Threads
by Otter Child
Summary: An anomalous reading and the Doctor's piqued curiosity take him and his daughter to the edge of humanity's solar system. They land on a tiny colony on the very edge of deep space. A colony where something is going badly wrong.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note: This is a (very, very, extremely) delayed response to Jessa L'Rynn's Dalek Cann challenge. Possibly stepping out of the parameters a bit; you be the judge.**

1

The Doctor smiled to himself. Today was going to be a good day. He just had that sort of a feeling about it. He was dressed in a new suit, a fine brown pinstripe affair. He'd gotten the odd dye off his red and white trainers. And the anthermic modulator was working again. Yes. It was going to be a good day. His smile widened as he sauntered down the corridor, hands in his pockets. He was pretty sure Jenny was up, but if he hurried he _might_ even get first crack at the toast and marmalade.

As he walked, his smile faded slightly. Something was niggling in the back of his consciousness, an itching ache that trickled down behind his eyes. Something was happening that made the TARDIS uncomfortable. The Doctor's brow creased, his feet picking up speed.

_What's the matter, old thing?_

The corridors twisted and bent ahead of him, leading him to the source of the problem. He was hurrying now, eyes intent. Something was wrong. The Doctor paused-then he inhaled sharply, catching a scent in the still air.

_Smoke._

He broke into a run. Dashing past the libraries, he raced through the solarium, eyes flickering. _How could a fire have gotten started? How?! Where is it?!_

Coming around a bend in the corridor, he skidded to a halt. The hall ahead of him was obscured in a billowing black-grey cloud. Most of it seemed to be pouring out of a doorway he could barely discern, the doorway to what he guessed was the kitchen.

"What?!" He exclaimed, staring. "What?!!"

The TARDIS vented its displeasure through his head, galvanizing him to push into the cloud, coughing as he breathed smoke that tasted of ozone and burnt plastic. He squinted into the darkness. Nothing to see. But there was plenty to hear. Boots clattered on tile, cupboard doors were crashing open and closed. And Jenny was cursing in her head.

_Oh damn! Oh damnit, damn,damn, what the hell did it go and do that for?!! Oh shix, there's another flame! Oh he's gonna kill me! And the TARDIS- don't be pissed with me right now, I've gotta fix this- DAMN!_

"Jenny? What…what…" the Doctor coughed, waving ineffectually against the acrid smog. "What…

_Oh shix, shix, shix,damn!!! _"Father, wait a moment! Have it out in a sec!"

"What?!"

A splash and a loud hiss. A fan clicked on overhead, drawing away the smoke as the Doctor stepped into the room, scanning the gloom with wide eyes. There was Jenny, a large jug in hand, staring at something on the counter that fizzled and smoked.

"What…what…what…" He took a step closer, squinting incredulously. "Is that the _microwave_?"

Jenny nodded, staring at the blackened lump, then glanced at her father, wide-eyed. "The thing just… exploded."

"I can see _that_!" The Doctor stepped across the room, eyes fixed on the mess in shock. "How..what…what…what did you do to the _microwave_?! I mean, a _microwave_! What could you possibly have done to a _microwave_, Jenny?" He skipped back from his inspection as the microwave let off a shower of sparks.

Jenny's petite shoulders rose in a shrug. "I don't know. I just stuck the pot of spaghetti you made in there, and then it-" She waved a hand toward the machine-"did _that._"

Her father's eyebrows were nearly touching his hairline as he stared at the lump of plastic and metal. Then he stiffened, and, slowly, turned to look at her.

"A pot? Did you just say you put a _pot_ in the microwave?"

Jenny nodded. "Yes."

"One of the bluish metal pots? The febra metal?"

"That's what it was in." She stared back at him, puzzled and oblivious. The Doctor closed his eyes for a long moment. He drew a breath for good measure. The microwave spat wetly.

_I am not going to yell. _

"_Think_, Jenny." He gritted between his teeth, "On what principle, exactly, does a microwave oven work?"

"Dielectric heating." Jenny replied promptly. "The cavity magnetron inside emits electrical waves that form as microwave radiation, and those excite all the electrons in the object simultaneously so that they…oh…"

The Doctor rolled his eyes dramatically. "Yes, _oh_! Metal is _conductive_. Febra metal is _super_ conductive. You _don't_ give microwaves something to conduct off. Thus, you _don't_ put _metal_ in the microwave. Unless you want something to explode. Which I _don't._ Not in the _kitchen_."

"I didn't think-"

"Oh now _that's _the understatement of the day!"

Jenny glared up at her father, before glancing again at the slag of a machine, still fizzling slightly. She sighed.

"Sorry."

"Sorry's one thing-" The Doctor reached out a hand, then snatched it back, shaking burnt fingers.

"Ooh! But if you'd thought before you acted, it wouldn'tve happened."

Jenny nodded, chagrinned. "Yeah. Sorry." She stared at the smoking slag, her thin frame so chastened that it almost made the Doctor smile at the sheer eccentricity. He glanced at the microwave again, and couldn't help it. A grin quirked his lips.

"It's a new record, I'll have to say. Exploding something before you've been awake an hour." He glanced at the mess again, and shook his head. "I'm not letting you forget this, you know." He turned to Jenny, his eyes laughing.

"Come on, help me get this cleaned up. We can stop by Earth for a replacement and breakfast."

The mess wasn't as bad as it looked. Before long the only remnant was the faint smell of ozone and burnt spaghetti. Jenny walked with her father towards the console room. It seemed like an awfully long way today. Jenny reached out for the room's signature in her mind. What she got in return felt like a slap across the back of her head.

"Ow!"

"Looks like you've gotten on its nerves." The Doctor commented, strolling along. Jenny shot the wall of the ship an annoyed glare.

_I didn't know it would explode._

Nothing. She brushed fingers along the wall.

_Alright, sorry._

The wall warmed beneath her fingers. Her father shot her a sideways smile.

"Much better. Ah, here we are!"  
Pushing open the door of the console room, the Doctor bounded up on to the grate that surrounded the time rotor.

"Come up and hold both grava-thrusters and the stabilizer matrix. This'll most likely be a bumpy ride. Seems like any time I head to the fiftieth century it gets rough, no idea why. But, best gizmos around, so allons-y. Double check that calculation you just input. Last thing we want to do is bounce in the wrong direction and land somewhere nasty."

"Again." Jenny added. She leaned sideways, flicking two dials, hitting a lever with her foot.

"Again." Her father agreed. "And mind where your feet land."

"Always do."

"Ha. Famous last words."

Jenny ignored the comment, her fingers dancing over the controls.

"Everything ready over here."

"Get over at the gravimetric pump, then."

Jenny complied, stepping over to what had once been a bicycle pump and working it. The Doctor ran his eyes over the settings approvingly as he passed, pausing to look over the readings on the main monitor. His brows knitted together.

"Now that's strange." He hit several keys, and brushed fingers across the screen, bringing up new images. "What's this about?" He moved to another monitor, checked it, then pulled the main monitor over, looking from one to the other. Jenny watched him from her position at the stabilizers.

"What's going on?"

"Something very very odd." He said absently, checking figures, murmuring to himself. "This can't be right. Not right at all. Not remotely, conceivably, possibly at all."

"What?"

"These readings. We're picking up readings from…no. That can't be right." He smacked the side of the monitor with the flat of his hand, eyes on the figures. "No." he repeated incredulously. Leaving the readings, he took off around the console, turning knobs and flicking switches.

"Jenny, we're going to have to leave the trip to Earth for later. Lock on to the emission tracking that I just input. There's some sort of spatial disturbance coming through, and it's got to be a big one if we're picking it up from all the way out here. Really shouldn't be there, really really shouldn't be there. Hold the flux slip and the sec-well, make it tertiary stabalizers."

"These are figures for a quasar." Jenny said, typing in commands with one hand, holding two red switches down with the other.

"Look again." Her father said around the rotor. Jenny tried to look over the figures more closely, though her perusal was cut short as the ship juddered, making her grip the trim for support and race to work the gravimetric pump again. Her father bounded past her to input calculations.

"Right, get ready with the landing protocol." His daughter nodded, and after a moment the ship settled out of the Vortex.

"Very nice." The Doctor said, patting the trim of the console. He pulled the main monitor sideways, glancing over it. His brow creased.

"Signal's gone. I could've sworn it was just here." He glanced at Jenny. "You stayed on its track, right?"

"Yes. It was right at these coordinates. Did we miss it by a week?"

"No…Odd. Very odd. Something like that shouldn't just…" He turned, pensive, and strode across the room, grabbing his overcoat off the rack. Opening the door, he stepped out.

Jenny double-checked the readings, and turned away with a pat on the console trim, jogging across the room. Pulling her satchel from the rack, she glanced at her gun for a long moment, her head cocked. Then she shrugged to herself and turned away, dropping the strap of her satchel over her shoulder and stepping out the door.

The Doctor was standing, hands in pockets, peering at the low ceiling of the room they'd materialized in.

"A basement. Why does it have to be a basement we land in? Simultaneously some of the most boring and nerve-wracking of places, basements. Nasty things always seem to be happening in basements. And they all seem to have the same rubbish lighting."

He turned in a circle, studying the wires and tubes snaking across the ceiling, the dark rectangular bulks of machinery that loomed up in the grey half-light cast by an overhead panel, the concrete floor beneath his feet.

"Hmm. Not much down here, is there? Definitely nothing that could send out a signal like that."

He glanced around the room, brow creased.

"Let's poke around a bit." He said slowly, "But keep a weather eye out. Anything nasty pops up and you-"

"Get back to the TARDIS." Jenny said, finishing the well-known sentence. Her father nodded absently, striding away.

"You take that side, I'll take this."

"Right."

Jenny strode down a corridor between the towering metal boxes. Her eyes darted between the great cubes, scrutinizing, analyzing. What were these things? Storage units? Machines of some sort? Her eyes flickered into the shadows between the rectangular blocks. Nothing to see, yet.

The air tingled against her skin, prickling with static. She shrugged deeper into her denim vest, trying to shake the uncomfortable sensation from her skin.

Electrical current in the air, maybe. Which meant these things were probably mechanical. She paused, listening. There was a low hum in the air, a sound was more felt than heard. In the half light it gave the impression of life to the shadows. Jenny glanced over her shoulder. Nothing there. But the deep shades and stark patches of light set her on edge.

She took a few steps. Something tickled her awareness, and she whirled on her heel, arms up in a fighting stance. Only the ranks of machines met her eyes. She sighed, glancing between them.

_Oh what I'd do for my gun right about now._

The Doctor peered at the tall metal rectangles as he walked between them.

_We must've ended up in some sort of power station. Enough of these electro-synthetic units to power a small city. Very nice, but that wouldn't attract the TARDIS. Or cause such a massive disturbance. There's got to be something around here that's at least jumping time streams like mad to set her off._

He walked as he thought, glancing over the large power synthesizing units. Coming to one of the room's walls, he followed it, reading over the signs that dotted the concrete; green, yellow, even a deep mauve sign that stood out against the grey.

**Maintain Ear Protection at All Times**

**SARNA**

**DANGER! Do not contact synthesizer openings**

The Doctor turned as Jenny came jogging up beside him.

"See anything?"

"Nothing to report in the left quadrant."

He nodded. "No, not much down here."

Glancing at the signs again, murmured to himself.

"Sarna. Now what's that? Company? Research project, maybe? Something that's using all this power, most like." He glanced up at the ceiling.

"Oh, and look at that. Flux systems and power couplings in every direction. Power being produced as well as used, then. Lots of it. Curiouser and curiouser, as Mr. Carrol wrote..." With another comprehensive glance around the room, he turned back to his daughter.

"I say we take a look upstairs, poke about a bit. See if we can dig up the source of that little spatial disturbance anomaly."

"Think we won't be noticed?" Jenny asked.

"Nah." The Doctor tapped his knuckles against the nearest synthetic unit. "These'll cover the TARDIS's signal pretty well, and if they haven't noticed us by now then they probably aren't-"

A ringing klaxon blared through the room. Green and yellow lights flared from the walls, casting wild shadows across the room.

To the right and left, doors crashed open, admitting a throng of red-clad bipeds that quickly formed a ring, hemming them in. Long bronze rods leveled themselves at father and daughter. The Doctor threw up his hands.

"We're not armed! We're not armed!"

The individuals in the front of the crowd stepped closer, the reflective silver of their helmets showing him his own position, frozen against the flank of the nearest machine. The long rods in their hands trained their points on his chest, tips sparking with orange-red light. The Doctor held himself perfectly still, hands high in the air.

_Jenny, put up your hands. And _please_ tell me you're not armed right now_.


	2. Chapter 2

2

The café steamed, a black ribbon that wound itself into his mug. Technician Cranz really needed it today. He massaged his eyes while the cup filled, straightening his glasses before he took his first sip. The door behind him slid open, and Cranz nodded to the burly man who stepped in. The man nodded in reply, hands deep in the pockets of his red jumpsuit.

"Cranz."

"Morning, Trakel."

"That stuff still hot?"

"Unh-hunh." Cranz managed through a yawn. "Been brewing it around the clock."

"You do the night shift again?" Trakel asked in his deep, sing-song Eskalyan accent. Cranz nodded.

"Damn linac lost power at the end of the shift yesterday. Faulty charge coupling. Had to fix it before this morning."

Watcher Trakel nodded, the piercing yellow eyes he must have inherited from an Eske parent glowing in his ebony face.

"Last thing you boys need is someone else screaming about breakdowns."

"Tell me about it." Cranz replied morosely. They stood in companionable silence for a moment. Cranz glanced at the larger man, who could have made two of him at least. He liked Watcher Trakel. The man actually gave a damn about their work, unlike a lot of the men who guarded the SARNA facility. He sighed.

"At least it broke at the end of the shift, and not right in the middle. My department's still getting hate mail from the power outing three months ago."

"Made great fodder for the protestors too."

"Are they _still_ at it?"

Trakel nodded. "Me'n the boys picked up six in the last night alone. Got 'em on unlawful entry and vandalism. Too bad there's no charge for being damn nuisances."

Cranz shook his head. "Clean, safe power, negligible emissions, and what do people do about it? Protest."

Trakel shrugged his wide shoulders.

"Human nature, yar." He took another sip of his café.

The silence was cut by the bleep of the phone on Trakel's belt. He set down his mug, flipping the unit open.

"Trakel. Yar. Yar, comin' right down." He tucked the phone away, and downed the rest of his café in two gulps.

"Got to get to workin' now. They found a few more intruders, and thes'ns got pretty far in too. Be seeing you." The big man strode out the door, heading for the holding cells.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Jenny leaned against the wall, her eyes roving over the ceiling. White. White walls, white floor, a white bright enough to throw any shadow into knife-sharp relief. Only the wall on the other side of the room was different, displaying a clear door that gave a view of the hallway beyond. Which was also white. Jenny closed her eyes for a moment to find some relief. Energy conservation was the thing in a situation like this.

"Hey! Hey, you can't keep us in here forever!!" Jenny opened her eyes, watching the scruffy man who was her cellmate bang on the door. He was wasting his resources, Jenny noted; one glance at the color and thickness had told her the door was made from tri-silicate steel glass. No way out there. She stuck her hands in her jean pockets, leaning back. On the bench across the room, her father watched the man languidly.

"You going to make a habit of that?"

The man glared over his shoulder at the Doctor, pushing aside a frazzled mane of hair.

"I've been in here for a week, friend. That's a violation of our right to a speedy trial!" He banged on the door again for emphasis.

"Jem." A golden-haired girl said peevishly from the other side of the room, "Give it up. They'll just get roiled if you don't shut it."

"And they'll let us out tomorrow anyway. Just like last time." Her companion, a slight girl with violently pink hair, said cheerfully.

The Doctor quirked an eyebrow. "Last time? You make a hobby of getting thrown in cells then?" he asked curiously. She and the pudgy blonde gave him disparaging looks.

"We make a 'hobby' of standing up for what's right. Must be your first time in." the blonde girl said, looking the Doctor up and down.

"Um, yes." The Doctor answered quickly, "First time I've ended up in this cell, anyway. By the by, what's the right you're standing up for? Seems to have slipped my mind, slippery thing that it is." He looked from one girl to the other with cheerful interest. The woman with hair in a pink fantail looked at him uncertainly.

"Did they hit you on the head? If they did we can have a proper case; that's a violation of bodily rights."

"Yeah!" the man said from his post near the door, "Sue the Establishment bastards in the High Colony Court, or they'll break every right in the Charter."

"Establishment?" Jenny asked. The man shot her an incredulous look.

"The Establishment, you know. Big Brother, the top men. The goons from the Governing Body!"

The Doctor glanced up, and rolled his eyes.

"Oh, it's the sixties all over again. Twenty-three sixty two, isn't it? Must be. Or sixty-three. So, you lot'd be protestors then. Always loads of protestors about in the sixties. What's this particular protest about then?"

All three of his cell mates stared at him a moment.

"They did hit you on the head, didn't they?" the thin girl said. The Doctor shrugged, and sat back, crossing his arms.

"Sorry," Jenny said, "My partner's not very interested in politics. So what are you doing here?"

"Like you haven't heard." The blonde girl grumbled.

Jenny shook her head. "Nope. We're new here. Just checking in on the situation."

The man by the door stamped over to stand in front of Jenny, his eyes intense.

"The _situation_ is that these Establishment asses are doing damage every day this facility's running. We have studies linking its inaugural run to planetoid earthquakes and gas spouts-"

"And the sicknesses the workers have got, that could spread-" the pink-haired girl chimed in.

"They're causing untold damage to the local infrastructure." Her blonde companion added. Then all three of them were talking, loud indignant tones ringing around the room.

"And we're letting this power source into our homes and offices!"

"Better warnings to replace the damn feel-good messages they've been sending, and-"

The cell door slid open. The man who stepped inside cut the diatribe by his mere presence. He was gigantic, a great black mountain of a man who surveyed the cell with piercing eyes, yellow eyes with horizontal pupils. Routines for taking down an opponent so much larger than herself automatically started running in the back of Jenny's mind. The big man glanced at each cell mate in turn.

"Which of you came in last night?"

"That'd be us, hello." The Doctor said, springing from the seat. Jenny stood, watching the gigantic man carefully. He glanced from one of them to the other.

"You two're the saboteurs they caught down'n the electrostatic chambers?"

"Yes, s'pose we are," the Doctor answered glibly, "except we're not saboteurs. By the way, lovely cells you have here. Best I've seen in a while."

The great man stared at the Doctor for a moment, nonplussed. He glanced at the sheaf of papers in his hand.

"It says here that you were found in the lower electrostorage chamber. How'd you get in there?"

"Well that's friendly." The Doctor commented, "Not even a how-do, just 'how did you get in here."

The dark man's face set. "Don' play with me friend, or you'll catch it bad. We don' have much sympathy for saboteurs at SARNA."

"Sorry." The Doctor replied coolly, "But like I said, not saboteurs. Now, what are you holding us for exactly, seeing as we didn't actually sabotage anything in point of fact?"

"Breaking and entering."

"Well that doesn't wash." The Doctor said in what Jenny thought of as his 'haven't you gotten this yet?' tone, "We entered, yes, but we didn't 'break' at all. Double check your security systems, you'll find them all in working order."

"You were found touching a synthesizer unit."

"That illegal? "

"Yeah man!" the man by the door said sharply, "Give it to the Regime!"

The big man gave him a long, slow look.

"One more word out of you, and I'll really give you something to protest."

He turned his glare back on the Doctor.

"Breaking and entering-"

"Look, we didn't break in!" the Doctor said, exasperated, "My ship tracks certain types of energy signals, and it was attracted to your station, because…" he dug around in an inner coat pocket, pulled out the psychic paper, glanced at it and held it out.

"Because we're with the energy-qualitating branch of the tri-solarium governing body. Anything that sets off my ship like your station has earns an inspection. And don't think I'm not going to put being tossed in a cell into my report."  
The man took the wallet, his eyes flicking from father to daughter.

"Energy inspectors?"

"Yup." The Doctor said confidently. The big man glanced from the wallet to the pair again, before handing it back.

"I haveta make a call. Wait here."

"Well don't be all day about it." The Doctor said imperiously. Jenny glanced at his haughty expression, and fought to repress a smile. He was going to have fun being an inspector.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Watcher Trakel dialed the number with quick strokes, watching the picture form on the screen. The image coalesced, and his superior was staring at him. Head Technician Bourma looked back into the screen impatiently, his neat little mustache bristling slightly.

"Yes?" he snapped, "What is it?"

"Sir, we've got some people down here, inspectors from the tri-sol government, wanting to run a check on the facility."

"Inspectors?" The moustache bristled a little further. "That is the last thing I need right now, right in the middle of all this."

Trakel wondered if he should mention the accidental arrest. He started to try. "Sir-" But the little man on the other side of the screen sighed explosively.

"I don't have time for this." Bourma glanced to his left.

"Cranz, those calculations can wait. Go and give these inspectors the tour. Keep them amused. Where are they, Watcher?"

"In holding-cell three, sir."

"In what?!!" Bourma almost stood in agitation. "Did you say a holding cell?!"

"Yar, sir."

"Well get them out of there! Oh God, this is going to look terrible! Get them out right this second, you hear me, Trakel? And Cranz, apologize to them, do whatever you have to to make them happy, just get them to forget this mess-oh God Trakel, why the hell did you throw them in a cell?! No, never mind, don't tell me, I'll deal with you later. Go and get them out, didn't you hear me? Cranz, get moving now! Do anything, just keep them off my back until tomorrow!! Get going the both of you!!"

"Yar, sir."

Trakel clicked off the unit. This was shaping up to be a really awful day.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

The cell door slid open, admitting a small bespectacled man this time. He glanced around, looking acutely nervous.

"Inspector Smith? Inspector Good? So sorry about all this. We've had so many problems around- I mean, so many protestors and the like, we're really far too nervy at the moment. Please, follow me." he turned.

"Hey you goon! What about us?" the blonde haired girl yelped. The skinny man gave her a disparaging look.

"You lot are the Watcher's problem, thank God. Don't want to be here, don't make asses of yourselves breaking windows and yelling slogans."

He turned away, ignoring the phrases the three protestors tossed at him, and beckoned the Doctor and Jenny. Jenny glanced at her father, showing him the emotional equivalent of a question mark. He shrugged.

_Might as well. Eyes peeled, though._

Following the thin man, they stepped into the corridor.

"I still can't believe they put you in the cells. I'm Technician Cranz, by the way, I'll show you around here. My superior wants me to tell you how very sorry he is about this mess. The cells, stupid mistake."

"Oh, happens a lot." The Doctor said calmly, "We have a rather unconventional method of travel, gets mistaken for intrusion pretty often. So I take it this place is SARNA?" His eyes roved over the whitewashed walls. Judging by the air pressure in here, they were either on a particularly heavy planet or underground. Their recent cellmates had mentioned that this was a planetoid, so heavy was out of the question; probably underground then. One part of his mind analyzed and catalogued this and the details of his surroundings, while a much smaller portion listened to the man talk.

"And here's the lift, right here."

Another clear silicate door slid open, then closed behind them, a thin opaque shield slipping in to place within it.

"I hope you'll have a good time here on Sedna. We're really not as backward as people think. Maybe you'll have time to see the sights?" the technician asked, smiling placatingly. The Doctor smiled and nodded.

"Maybe."

"You should definitely see…"

The Doctor watched the boy absently, tuning out his wittering.

_He might as well have 'please don't be fussed I don't think I could handle it' tattooed on his forehead. Wonder how he got roped into showing the angry bigwigs about._

He tuned back into the conversation in time for the important bits.

"And you're in time to see the startup run for the day. We start the main driver in twenty minutes, you can see the whole project in action."

"Malto bene." The Doctor replied, "Now tell me about these units. You must be producing enormous amounts of energy here, based on what I got a chance to see downstairs. Enough to run a respectable city."

"Two, actually." The bespectacled man said, showing his first trace of genuine excitement, "New Sydney just signed on to the power plan last month. The grid still needs a bit of work, but…"

The lift clicked open on a small, cozy-looking room with a coffee-maker in one corner, a small refrigerator, and a television on the wall. Jenny stepped out, inspecting the surroundings.

"Would you like tea? Or how about some café?"

The Doctor shrugged, inspecting the room.

"Thanks much, but we're fine. Love that tour though, so if you can get us those badges that'd be grand. "

Jenny walked into the room as the Doctor talked, spotting a bowl of fruit on the table. She still hadn't gotten breakfast, and she was starving. She grabbed a pear and bit into it, glancing at the television.

"Of course." Technician Cranz said, "Be back in a moment." He shot the Doctor another nervous glance, and hurried out.

Jenny glanced around for the possibility of a pastry. The television played a jingling little tune, and Jenny glanced at it, watching what looked like the introduction for a news show, segueing into the image of a pretty young woman sitting at a desk.

"News Two, Sedna's premier news channel brings you news at eight. Good morning, I'm Vdra San. In Tavishem a small problem with the UV shielding over the greenhouses may have killed spice crops, cutting the sugar and cinnamon supplies almost in half. Farming staff are still working out the amount of damage. Earth is discussing sending an extra supply with the Council. Here in New Cardiff it's the ground that's getting all the attention; in the last month five rock shifts have caused alarm and minor damage to several buildings throughout the colony. The engineers have given their assurances that the outer shield struts are completely undamaged, and a twenty-four hour watch has been instituted on the perimeter. In other news-"

"Here you go." Cranz said, handing Jenny a small blue badge. "Just make sure you keep that on, don't want to set off the security protocols. Ready? Okay, for starters this is the SARNA power facility; we're in the break-room right now. Our technicians come in here when they need a breather, and when the collider is having a problem occasionally we sleep in here. Out here-" he opened the door, walking through, "we've got most of the offices for our PR department, marketing, product development customer service people. Out here a lot of times our technicians will take up one of these PR jobs as a secondary responsibility."

"Must be rough on you lads." The Doctor commented, reading the funny notes and comics that employees had stuck up on their doors as he passed. Cranz shrugged.

"It's not too bad really. This system is more highly automated than a lot of the other plants I've worked on, so most of our time is spent in observation or the control room anyway. We do have to do a lot of repair work, but with the plant running in its preliminary phase there isn't a lot to do. We'll be earning our pay when this place enters full capacity production, though."

"Full capacity?" Jenny asked. Cranz nodded. "Yes, we're only running at one and sometimes two-third capacity right now. Since this power source is experimental, the Council asked us to run just one of the colliders for a year to make absolutely sure of its safety. We passed the year mark last month, and so we're into the pre-total stages, getting ready to start to run at full power now. Down these stairs and I can show you the main turbines."

Walking behind the men, Jenny held the door open for the person behind their group. After a moment, she glanced behind her, then up and down the corridor.

_I could've sworn there was somebody behind us._ She shrugged to herself, and entered the stairwell. Her father's voice bounced off the walls of the stairwell shaft.

"Now you said colliders, is it atomic fusion you're doing here?"

"No, it's a little more advanced than that." Cranz replied, "And actually it's a lot cleaner too. We've cut our emissions from five percent down to one percent, and now we need only about thirty percent as much fuel from Earth as we used to. "

"Now that is impressive." The Doctor said, "Very impressive. SARNA. So funny that I don't remember that name, what with all you're doing here."

"Well, we are fairly new." Cranz said. "Here's the second floor, in here you can see a pretty good view of the turbines." Opening a door, he walked them onto a catwalk. Below them twenty machines, each the side of a large living room, spun within steel-mesh cages. Jenny peered, noticing the glass pane between them and the room below.

"These energy turbines transform the energy from the colliders into electrical power usable to the general population." Cranz said, raising his voice slightly over the gentle whir from below. "The glass below us is pretty much sound-proof, which is a good thing, because if it wasn't you could barely hear yourself think. And through here-" he led them into a wide room on the other side of the hall.

"This is our main control room. From here you can work just about every system in the building except the colliders themselves, and-" Cranz glanced at a clock on the far wall of the room, squinting through his glasses.

"Oh!" he turned back to his charges.

"I'd planned to do this a little more orderly, but would you like to take a detour? They're about to start up the collider for the morning run, and you can see it in action. "

"Well, as that is what we're here to inspect, lead the way!" the Doctor said, almost stepping in front of Cranz in his curiosity. He shot Jenny a grin.

_So a collider that's not working on fusion principles? I can't wait to see what they've come up with in here. Mind you I want to pop back up here and poke around a bit more. Some of these systems look quite interesting. _

_Yeah. I hope they'll let us when we're done with the tour._

The Doctor winked as they followed Cranz down another set of stairs

_Well they can't exactly refuse the inspectors, now can they?_

Down two more sets of stairs, they'd entered a long tunnel, curving gently. The Doctor glanced around.

"Now this is a bit familiar. I wonder…"

"It's like the original designs, but we've shortened the distances considerably. Tried something completely new in here. Have you read Dr. Bourma's report on it?"

"Can't say as I have, no."

"Oh. Oh…" Cranz glanced back at them. "Then a lot of the stuff I've been saying won't have been making much sense. I'm so…"

"Why don't you explain it to us?" Jenny asked quickly. She was tired of hearing the man apologize all the time. He looked at her for a moment apprehensively, then brightened

"Even better, Dr. Bourma is working as our Head Technician. Tomorrow he was expecting to meet with you; how would you like a full explanation of the theory from him? Would that be good?"

"That'd be grand." The Doctor said absently.

As they walked, Jenny shifted her shoulders uncomfortably. The skin along her spine prickled. She glanced over her shoulder, and mentally shrugged.

_No defined threat. It is a power station. Electromagnetic fields can do that, I guess. Not actually harmful. Just ignore it._

She pulled the lapels of her denim vest a bit tighter about her shoulders, matching steps with her father.

Around the bend in the corridor, a blocky white structure poked from the wall.

"Here we go!" Cranz said. He pulled the door open, giving them entry. The Doctor stepped into the room with interest. Jenny followed him, studying the surroundings.

_More white_ she thought to herself, eyes flickering over the room. The walls of the room were the same phosphorescent shade as the cells had been, as were the control stations they were facing, manned by men in white coats and hardhats. Beyond the control panels the room dropped away into a sunken box, around a hundred feet in diameter if Jenny's guess was right. And situated in the middle of it was-Jenny really didn't know _what _it was.

It looked like three enormous hourglasses, laid on end and stacked into a pyramid. Two gigantic metal tubes curved from either end of the room, meeting at the structure. A clear cylinder surrounded the place where the three hourglass shapes pinched, surrounded on the edges by a network of blue and white wires. Jenny cocked her head, staring at it.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Cranz stepped over to the control banks, speaking with the men on shift for a moment. Taking two hard-hats from a coworker, he stepped back to the inspectors. They barely noticed. They were staring at the collider array, eyes narrowed in nearly identical fashion. The tall man's eyebrows were drawn together as he peered down into the collision chamber, and the girl had her head cocked, staring at the mechanism. They'd probably never seen anything remotely like it before.

"Impressive, isn't it?" he said. Both inspectors started, the girl looking at him with wide eyes. What a weird pair. He deserved better pay for doing jobs like this.

The older inspector smiled enthusiastically. "Impressive? Oh, oh yes, definitely impressive. Interesting design you have going here. You say you're not doing atomic collisions and I can see that from the positioning of the convectors. Now the work itself'll be interesting to see. I take it you control the reactions from up here? "

Cranz nodded. "Yes, this is our reaction control deck. In a moment we'll be starting the day cycle. I'll be helping with the work; enjoy the show."

"Thanks." The older inspector said, "And is it all right if we poke about, 's long as we're not in the way?"

Any other time Cranz would have said no. But these two were probably miffed enough as it was; no need to make it worse.

"Be my guest." He said, stepping to his place on the coolant controls.

The older inspector made a beeline for the mechanisms used to monitor the hadron count and the particle velocity, murmuring to himself. The girl took in the room with a comprehensive sweep of her eyes, pulling at the lapels of the retro denim vest she wore. Her partner straightened, exclaiming earnestly.

"Oh, it's proton particle beam acceleration and collision you're doing here, hmm? Very nice. Ooh, and this is interesting…Jenny, come'n have a look, this is really pretty fine work for its- for the state they've gotten it to."

The younger inspector stepped next to her partner. Overhead, the speakers came online.

"All right everyone. Panel two, watch the coolant levels. Bringing the energy accelerators online… releasing the particle streams now… And here we go."

Cranz dialed up the coolant, then watched as the energy beams shot between the lowest of the collision points, appearing at the macrocosmic level as two strands of laser-like purplish light. The center glowed bright white, enough to make Cranz squint even behind the protective glass over the collision chamber. He smiled. Everything going perfect today.

A small gasp made him glance at the inspectors. The girl's eyes were huge in a face that had gone almost bone-white. She looked away from the reaction, then back at it, squinting. Her partner's body was stiff as a rod, his dark brows knotted together. He blinked and glanced around the room, almost stumbling. What could be wrong with them now?

"Is anything wrong?"

The man turned, staring at him, his eyes wide.

"Wrong?" He shook his head, then looked back at Cranz.

"Oh no, nothing wrong, nothing much. Just something …" He glanced at the collision point, and drew a deep breath.

"Yes, well that was very interesting. Think we could move on with the tour now, hmm?"

He turned towards the door. His partner beat him to it, holding on to the door frame as she moved through it. Her partner followed her, the expression on his face almost pained. Cranz locked his station into automatic and followed them, rolling his eyes. These two were getting weirder all the time.


	3. Chapter 3

3

"I'm not hungry sir."

Jenny handed back the plate she'd been given. The man across the cafeteria counter shrugged, putting it aside as she walked away. She dropped into a chair beside her father. He glanced at her.

"Not going to eat?"

She shook her head slightly, crossing her arms over her chest. "Not hungry."

"Mm." her father replied, poking at the teabag that bobbed in his cup. "You still dizzy?"

"I'm fi…" She met his eyes, and glanced down. "Yes. A little."

The Doctor's thin mouth set. He pushed his mug towards her.

"Here. Drink some of this. It'll help settle your stomach."

Jenny took the cup in her hands, glancing around the room as she sipped.

"Where's our guide?" she asked quietly.

"Gone for the moment, I 'spect he needs a breather. So now we can talk."

"Great." She took another sip of the tea, letting the heat warm her gut. "Where are we exactly?"

Her father sighed, leaning back in his chair.

"Oh, the year twenty-three sixty-three, waaay out in the edge of Sol's back garden. Any further out and we'd be sitting on the fence. We're on Sedna, this tiny little ball of rock eight million miles from their sun, way out in what they call the Oort Cloud, basically the bits of stuff that didn't make it into planets and just floats about out here. It's just barely hanging in orbit, takes _ages_ to go once around the sun. Mining colony from the looks of it, must be mining for iron and hematite. See, around now they stop mining on Earth, all this about planetary conservation, so they exploit everything else in their solar system instead. Awful long way to come for them, still takes them around three months to get out here, but there's always a handful of them who'll do things like that. You feel any better?"

Jenny nodded. Mainly she felt tired. After the episode down in the reaction chamber, the Doctor had explained it away to their guide: "Just gravity sickness, you know, readjusting to the difference, takes a bit." And he'd bought it, which was good. Except that he'd continued their tour for another two hours, when all Jenny had wanted to do was sit down somewhere and quell the roiling in her stomach. Her gut still hurt, though the pounding in her head and the vertigo had let up. Mostly.

"And what was that, downstairs?" she asked, handing back the mug. The Doctor shrugged, taking a sip.

"Not sure yet. Something was definitely off down there, though. Distinctly off. Decidedly off. And did you see the way the lines…" He glanced away. "Well, never mind about the lines."

"The time lines?" Jenny asked. Her father nodded, taking another sip.

"What was wrong with them?"

He shrugged noncommittally. "Oh, nothing I can put my finger on as of yet. Looked a little like one thing and a little like another, but wasn't really either one. Not normal though, that's for sure. Made me feel a bit off just to look at it, and it hit you too. No one else seemed to notice, though. You and I get sick and no one else feels a thing; that's quite a change in circumstances, isn't it? Too low of a threshold for them to pick up yet, I suppose." He shook himself. "Nasty thing though. Haven't bumped into something that made me feel squeamish in _years._"

Jenny nodded. _Nasty _was an understatement. Standing in that room, she'd felt like the floor was trying to buck her off. The light in the mechanism had been sickening to look at, and it had taken most of her willpower not to retch on the pure white floor. She hoped she never had to be in that skin-crawling, stomach twisting place again.

"Do we need to neutralize it?" she asked, watching the workers pass by, chatting amiably. The Doctor frowned, shook his head.

"Shouldn't think so. Particle acceleration-collision can sometimes warp spacetime if it's fast enough, whole basis of some ship designs actually, and that can make things pretty uncomfortable for us as we pick up on it. Not actually intrinsically dangerous, just a terribly messy way to work with Time, that might account for downstairs. Odd though. Very odd." He turned in his chair, facing Jenny. She watched him intently as he thought aloud.

"They've been running this place for a year and it hasn't caused a problem, though there is some sign of something down near the colliders. Probably what attracted the TARDIS and threw you and me. What I felt reminded me of high rift activity…" he gulped down the rest of his tea, and pushed the mug away pensively. "But it doesn't wash. No sense to it at all."

"Hasn't it caused some difficulties?"

He glanced up at his daughter.

"What?"

She shrugged, fingers fiddling with the strap of her satchel. "What the people in the cells said."

The Doctor snorted. "Oh, them. Protesters, Jenny; wrong nine times out of ten, even when there's a grain of truth to what they're yelling. Might as well forget what they were saying. All the same…I think we'd better hang on here for a few days, make sure everything's working the way it ought."

"Do we have to?" Jenny asked. He glanced at her. That room had made her more uncomfortable than he'd thought. At least these days she'd say if she didn't want to do something instead of taking it like an order. But this time they really did need to.

"It'd be best." He replied. "Things like these can get out of hand awfully fast if they're not ship-shape and Bristol fashion. Shouldn't take too long, though. Three days at most."

Jenny nodded reluctantly.

"Right. So what should I be watching out for?"

He started to answer her, when their skinny guide dropped into the seat beside him. The boy was beginning to be a bit of an annoyance.

"Sorry about that." The boy said cheerfully, "I had to wait for the printer. Got you guys printouts of Doctor Bourma's papers and the blueprints and workups for this place. I thought they might interest you."

The Doctor took the folder full of papers eagerly. "Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant. Now we'll know what we're about when we talk to your boss tomorrow. Thanks."

"Sure." The young man said, adjusting his glasses. "Do you know where you'll be staying the night?"  
"We'll be sleeping in our ship." Jenny replied quickly. The boy shot her a doubtful look.

"Are you sure? We can provide you rooms here in the facility if you'd prefer."

"We're-"

"Actually a room would be just the thing." the Doctor said, closing the file with a snap, "We'll be staying for about a week, standard procedure and all that, and a ship gets just a bit tight in that time you know. So, where do we bunk?"

Their guide led them down several corridors and towards a room. He opened the door for them.

"We keep these rooms for visiting technicians."

It was nicely appointed, if a bit sparse. Cranz stepped inside, standing awkwardly near the door. "The bathroom's right in there. Go ahead and call one of us if you need anything. Your meeting with Dr. Bourma is scheduled for ten tomorrow. Anything else you'd like to see?"

"Actually," the Doctor said, "it'd really be very nice to get a chance to settle in, take a load of and such." He walked over and dropped on to the bed, enjoying the spring of the mattress, then glanced back up at the technician.

"Cheerio then!"

"Right…" the sandy-haired man said carefully. He stepped back and closed the door. The Doctor shot a grin at his daughter.

"Thought he'd never go, didn't you?"

She returned his smile, dropping onto the bed beside him.

"I felt kind of sorry for him. He hated being detailed to watch us."

"Well he took it with good grace. Now let's see about these papers…" Rolling over on his stomach, the Doctor pulled open the folder he'd been given, riffling through the pages. He finished the last page in the stack with brows knotted together.

"Hmm. This is just the introductory stuff, not the working figures. Some very odd work they've got in here, though. Math's all funny."

Flipping back a few pages, he selected a small sheaf of the papers, found a pen in one of his pockets and began to scribble in the margins of the sheet.

"Why'd you get us this room?" Jenny asked.

"Wanted to be near the action, see for ourselves." The Doctor replied shortly, the tip of the pen in his mouth as he thought. He scribbled a few figures down, then crossed them out and wrote something new.

"Can I have the rest?" Jenny asked.

"Hmm?" her father barely glanced up."Oh, papers. Yes, have at them."

Jenny took the ones he'd left and riffled through them, reading up on the place's construction and purpose. Apparently SARNA had been built in order to release Sedna from its dependence on Earth-imported fuel. Other power sources had been tried, but since Sedna had no wind, no water, no geothermic activity whatsoever, and the Sun was basically a speck just a little brighter than all the other specks in the sky, their power sources were a little limited. They'd narrowed it down to fusion and particle acceleration, and particles had won. Jenny put down the text section of the papers, staring at the drawings curiously.

_So this is how a sub-atomic collider works._ She thought, studying the diagrams. She committed to memory the part of the machine where the beams of atoms were cut down into their separate protons, then the mechanisms that accelerated them just below light speed, and finally the point at which they were shot at very high velocities right into each other, colliding In a super-condensed explosion that destroyed each set of particles and released massive amounts of energy. Her eyes flickered over the page, learning how that energy was siphoned off and used to power everything from life support to vehicles.

_They've got one running, and it's powering two cities all on its own. They're right; when they get all three going they really won't need anything else._

There was a map of the entire six-story structure, and she committed that to memory as well, just in case, as well as the daily facility schedule.

Jenny laid the papers aside, and glanced around the room. She sat still, listening. The scritch of her father's pen on the paper. His slight noises to himself. A fan whirring somewhere. She concentrated on her sense of time, trying to keep the feeling of seconds passing into minutes in her head. Twenty three minutes, five seconds passing…she checked her watch, and smiled slightly. Exactly on target.

She glanced around the room again. Not much to hold the attention. Digging in her satchel, she found a deck of cards and played a few rounds of Tarfewe solitaire. Five rounds. Boring. She shifted uncomfortably on the bed. Even now she still felt itchy, uncomfortable in her own skin. To dispel the feeling she jumped from the bed and started a Retha yoga routine. Her father shot her a glare as she began to use the wall for a springboard.

"D'you mind, I'm trying to do calculations here."

"Sorry, Father." Coming out of her stance, Jenny came around the side of the bed, looking over the Doctor's shoulder at the half-scribbled calculations, which had now taken up the backs of most of the papers he'd selected.

"Can I help with anything?"

He shook his head slightly "Sorry Soldier, but I'd better do these m'self. Want to be absolutely sure…gah, that mad little alpha keeps slipping away. Maybe there…" He scribbled down another set of figures, eyes fixed on his work. Jenny turned away, standing for a moment, hands in her jean pockets. She plucked restlessly at the strap of her satchel, then pulled the thing off. Digging through it absently, her fingers encountered a brush. She glanced at it, and shrugged to herself.

_Might as well. Something to do anyway._

Walking into the small attached bathroom, Jenny glanced at herself in the mirror. Her skin was still paler than it should be, leached of color by the overhead phosphorous bulbs. She shrugged to her image, and turned on the faucet, letting water run over her hands and soothe away the itchy, grimy sensation that overlaid her skin. She leaned into the stream, splashing her face with the cold liquid.

The water seemed to waver under her hands. Jenny opened her eyes, glancing up.

_What was that?_

Her reflection looked back at her in the mirror. But now it was not alone. A man's face stared into the glass. Jenny whirled on her heel, body stiff as steel. The man standing just behind her didn't respond. He stood with a towel around his waist, glancing at the mirror; ran a hand through his hair, smiled, turned away, and vanished.

"Jenny!"  
The Doctor came skidding into the room just in time to see the stranger turn and disappear. He stared at the point, eyes wide.

"That's not a good sign." He said quietly. "Not a good sign at all."

For a moment, the pair of them stood still, staring. Then they broke into simultaneous movement.

"That was a time-splice, wasn't it?" Jenny asked, stepping carefully around the spot, "A bit of some other time being pushed out of continuum and into the present? He wasn't really here, I could see that."

"Time splice or line-variance crossing, yes." The Doctor said, whipping out his sonic screwdriver, "Or maybe a time slip. This isn't a nodal point, so it shouldn't be happening at all. So what's causing it?"

He ran the screwdriver over the floor, the walls, over the shower stall and the door into the bathroom, checking the readings and glancing back from it to the spot in the floor, his eyes narrowing. Absently one hand reached out, as if he was feeling the air. Jenny knew that he was actually working his way through the time-lines of the room, finding the ones that were out of synch.

"Well we've got a nice little mess on our hands here." The Doctor said.

"Are the lines crossing?" Jenny asked. Crossed timelines were in the 'this is very bad' category, she'd picked that up from experience. To her relief, the Doctor shook his head.

"No, nothing as serious as that. Just…well, it looks like somebody dropping a stitch in their knitting, this little point in time is loose and sort of poking out, snagging on other points in the continuum from time to time." He dropped into Gallifreyan, giving her the precise details. She nodded.

"You picked up all that on the screwdriver?"

"Some of it. Mostly it's in here." He said, tapping his temple.

"So what knocked it loose?"

The Doctor shrugged, hands in his pockets, eyes far away. "Can't say for sure, not without the TARDIS. Sometimes it's natural, sometimes… I can probably stabilize it though, no more gents popping in while we're bathing-give us a tick."

He closed his eyes, breathing deeply. After a few moments, he leaned back against the counter.

"That's sorted, then." But he didn't look much relieved. If anything his face had become more pensive.

"Father?"

He glanced at her, his eyes dark.

"Something is going on here, isn't it?"

The Doctor stared at her for a moment. Then he nodded.

"Oh yes. And you know, I'm not sure I like it."

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

By the next day, the Doctor had gone through all the calculations he'd been given, and hadn't found much to enlighten him. The work they were doing in this station had the potential for causing some spatial anomalies, and since they were concentrating massive amounts of energy in small spaces, it could conceivably cause small rifts to open. But it didn't seem to be enough to cause what he'd seen so far. He'd taken to pacing the room as he thought. Jenny had drifted off for an hour, and now she was awake, sitting on her bed with a holo game she'd dug out of her bag. She glanced up as her character took a swing at the enemy.

"Think it's time for breakfast yet?"

He glanced at her in slight surprise. "Hmm? Oh, food. Yes, I suppose they might be serving it now. Give us something to kill time until we meet with the top man, anyway. Got quite a lot of questions to ask him when we get our interview, looking forward to that…" He patted his pockets, looking for a watch.

"Hate being on these little low-gravitationally regulated rocks, there's no decent rotation to order the day by. Where's that-ah, you're wearing one. What time is it then?"

Jenny held out her wrist, showing her watch.

"Eight o'clock. I recalibrated it back in the cell, so it should be accurate."

Her father turned on his heel. "Brilliant. Come on then, let's see what there is for eating."

They were able to waste the time left to them in the cafeteria, watching the workers as they got ready for their day. The Doctor wasn't particularly hungry; in fact he had to force himself to down a muffin and a banana, which was definitely unusual for him. Jenny pushed her toast and kippers around her plate, her pale face drawn. Finally, the Doctor pushed back his chair, straightening his brown suit-jacket.

"Right then, let's go meet Dr. Bourma."

They'd been given a small paper with Dr. Bourma's office number and floor. The Doctor moved through the hallways with little trouble, following the map he'd set to memory. Up two flights of stairs, they found a door blazoned with the words 'SARNA, Head Technician; Doctor H.M. Bourma.' The door was partly open, and the Doctor put a hand against it, poking his head inside.

"Hello? Anybody in?"

A small man started up from his desk, and glanced at his watch.

"Oh! Oh, come in, come in. You're the inspectors. Please take a seat."

"Thanks much." The Doctor said cheerfully, walking into the room. "I'm Inspector Smith, an' this is my partner, Inspector Good. Thanks for taking the time out to see us. Lovely facility you have here. I looked over the papers I was given last night; some very creative work you've done around here."

"Oh yes." The little man said, his pigeon chest puffing out slightly, "Yes we've tried something completely new here. Or rather, we've rediscovered a great advance from the twenty-first century that was never truly brought to its fruition. Here on Sedna, we've taken the discoveries of our forefathers to their full potential."

The Doctor nodded thoughtfully. "That's good. That's very good. You should put that on the promotional materials. So what discovery are you reworking then?"

The little man gave him a look that seemed to imply 'do you mind?', He cleared his throat, brushing a hand across his neat little mustache.

"We've based our work here on the studies done by the pioneering researchers at CERN. You've read of them, I assume?"

"Hmm?" the Doctor asked, eyes roving over the pictures of Bourma standing with important individuals.

"Oh yes, CERN lads, did a lot of interesting work in their day. So tell us what you're doing with it." He leaned in attentively, elbow on his knee, chin resting on his fist. The little head technician puffed up a bit further. He was the type that very much liked to be listened to, the Doctor noted. Well, perfect. They'd get plenty of information out of him, then. The little man cleared his throat again.

"Well, to give you the full affect I'll have to remind you of the history of this sort of work. Three hundred years ago, the visionary researchers at CERN found a method of colliding atoms of matter together in a precise and reliable fashion. The progenitor of all this was a mechanism known as the Large Hadron Collider, a great step forward for its time. Here at SARNA, we've taken the next step in their research. While CERN's work was a project of pure science, we have been able to harness the energy in order to create viable power for this colony. In our work we're able to collide particles at almost a billion times the speed of that first collider. By revolutionizing the acceleration space through using three collision rings we've drastically cut down the distance necessary for the work. And we've improved the original coolant and insulation situations, you see,"

_This man can talk longer than a Balhoun. When do you think he'll get to the interesting stuff?_

The Doctor suppressed a smile.

_Give it a bit, Jenny. You never know what might turn out to be important._

"-only have to be shut down each night, as opposed to the ancient colliders which required months of re-calibration and cooling between runs. Quite an achievement, I must say."

"Mm." the Doctor said dryly, "I'm sure."

The little man went on with his waffling. "At the moment our main goal is to break the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit, which will allow us to produce enough power to allow our colony to run with complete independence, indefinitely."

"And how fast are you colliding them right now?" the Doctor asked. Now they were getting down to the answers he needed. Dr. Bourma leaned back in his chair with a specious little smile.

"At the moment, our singular collider is running at six to the eleventh power GeV. Once we have the second and third colliders that will raise to a speed of fifteen to the eleventh power, far beyond light speed and a good bit beyond warp speed as well. All carefully controlled, of course. We have approximately seventy thousand collisions a millisecond at full power. If you'll be staying as long as I was told, you'll actually be given the rare treat of being present while this occurs. We'll be turning on the secondary collider loop at noon today, and the tertiary loop tomorrow morning. There will be a small celebration downstairs at noon. Reporters and holo-tapings will occur I believe. And tomorrow a full inaugural celebration will be held at breakfast; you're both welcome to attend."

"Thanks." The Doctor said, "We'll have to do that." His daughter shot him a glance. He sat calmly, listening to the little man. He was quite an expert at concealing emotions behind a polite façade, but Jenny picked up on the emotions under the surface. Beneath that surface, the Doctor was getting concerned.

He cut into the man's discussion of the next day's festivities. "Oh, before I forget, could I get copies of the working math that your technicians are using in the actual work they're doing? You know, the every-day stuff, what they're using to plan out the collisions. For our records and such." The Doctor smiled disarmingly.

Dr. Bourma looked the Doctor in the eye, his face drawn into affronted lines.

"You were given my papers, I as I recall?"

"Oh yes, I read the introductory stuff, very good, very very good, but I really need the working data sets and details. Daft ol' rule I know, but the home office's very strict about this, absolutely dictatorial about it, and I don't want to get you lot in trouble because I come home without it."

"Well." The little man huffed, "Well, fine. I'll have copies sent down to your room."

The Doctor nodded, putting on a wide smile. "Lovely, thanks very much. And then-"

"I'm so sorry." The little man said, standing, "But please excuse me now. I must check on the preparations for this afternoon and tomorrow morning. Much to do, little time, you know."

"Oh, 'course." The Doctor exclaimed, bouncing from his chair, "Well, we'll be seeing you then, thanks much, we'll be going, see you tomorrow most probably." He got them out the door with one last, quick grin.

"Bye!"

Out in the hall, he tucked his hands in his pockets, hurrying down the hall.

"How long d'you think they'll take to deliver those papers?" He asked aloud, walking fast. Jenny shrugged, watching him.

"No idea. Their work's accelerating particles extremely fast."

"Too fast." The Doctor replied. "Much too fast. What time is it?"

"Eleven o'clock by the colony's time."

"Good, that gives us an hour then. Give us a chance to check up on a few things, and then we can get ourselves ready for going to that secondary collider start-up." He'd dropped his happy-go-lucky act completely by now, and his face was set.

"We're going to be in there for that?" Jenny asked, glancing at her father uneasily. He nodded. "We need to, I need to see what's happening. I'm afraid we might get some really nasty results if they're really forcing atoms to the speeds they say they are. Anyway, let's drop by the room, then get down to the collision chamber. We'll whip something up to keep us from falling over again, won't be too hard now that we know what to watch out for. I may need you to run down to the TARDIS and pick up some things."

"Right."

The Doctor spent the next twenty minutes pacing around the room, waiting. He hated waiting, especially when he was nervous. And he was getting awfully close to nervous. Figures danced through his head as he walked, figures for speeds of matter and the amount of stress atomic bonds could hold up under. He ran his fingers through his hair, spiking it absently as he thought.

_Colliding matter beyond warp levels…it ought to just fall apart; what's holding it together?_

_How long does it take to deliver a few bloody papers?_

_Lesse, what if they're supercooling it-nah, still heat up and fall apart anyway_

_And timelines coming loose, not just in that chamber…timelines coming loose…they couldn't have-no, they couldn't have gotten it up fast enough to…_

"Got what you asked for." Jenny said, walking back into the room. She set the box she was carrying on the bed, and dropped down beside it.

"Oh good." The Doctor stepped over and flipped open the lid, rifling the contents with practiced hands.

"Right, everything's here…"

Jenny glared at him, one hand on her knee."What did you expect?"

"Just checking, checking… Right, give me a hand."

With Jenny's help, the Doctor laid the items he'd told her to bring out on the bed. Plucking two items, he pulled out the sonic screwdriver, welding them together on one edge.

"Hand me your key, Jenny."

She pulled her copy of the TARDIS key from around her neck, handing it to her father, who slipped it into the slot he'd left between the conjoined materials.

"Right, now…"

"What are you doing?"

"Tell you in a mo. Now hush." He really needed to concentrate on this bit. Bending the pieces of the impromptu temporal circuit tighter together, the Doctor also pulled the loops of Time that surrounded each object into synch. The key, being a part of his TARDIS, had the dominant timeline, the absolutely stable one, and he locked the time signatures of the other parts of the circuit into it. Then he sat back, a small smile on his face as he handed it over, the key encased in a bubble of absolute time that glowed brightly to his eyes.

Jenny took it, her face studious.

"So…you took it out of time?" she glanced up at him, inquiring. A very small, very well-shielded part of him sighed as he smiled. She was so close to understanding, sometimes he almost forgot that the timelines were something she sensed rather than saw or understood.

"Almost. I pulled a bit of the TARDIS's temporal grace into the key. Should give us nice bubbles of absolute time, shield us from the effects of the temporal shifts that happen when matter's accelerated. Let me just-" he made the adjustments to his own key, and hung it back around his neck.

"There we are." He nodded, and took up his overcoat. "Now, allons-y."

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

The reaction chamber was packed with people now, people in fancy clothes who exclaimed over the controls and smiled for the two or three camera-men who flickered through the group. Minor dilettantes of all sorts, the Doctor judged, doing their best to make what they could out of social life on humanity's latest and smallest outpost. They were handed small white cards, and entered the crowd. The dilettantes cluttered the top deck, occasionally gesturing at the accelerator with its one humming collider. The Doctor glanced surreptitiously at his daughter. Her face was blank and perfectly calm, her body tense; her battle ready pose. He caught Jenny's eye.

_Ooh look, they've got bananas at the buffet._

The tension in her body let up a little, and she shook her head slightly, smiling.

_I can't believe you._

He shrugged, and moved deeper into the crowd. He wasn't hungry in the slightest, but he took up a place near the buffet table anyway, since in his experience it was the best place for listening in on conversation. Leaning against the wall, he watched the crowd move and chat. He noted the technician that had given them their tour wandering through the crowd. His eyes lit on laughing women and men who smiled complacently. Attendees dropped by the buffet, snacking and chatting over the actions in their small community.

Two men walked up near the Doctor's end of the table. The shorter man grabbed one of the water carafes, pouring a glass with his eyes on the taller, darker man, who'd set his hands on the table.

"I told you I'm fine." The man said quietly.

"Just drink this Jeff."

The Doctor's attention pricked up. The peaky-looking man took a sip of the water, and shook his head a little. He stood back, and stumbled, steadied by his friend on one side and the Doctor, who stepped forward quickly, on the other.

"Whoa there." The Doctor said, "You all right?"

The man nodded, squinting for a moment.

"Yeah, just the damn double vision again."

"This happen to you very often?" the Doctor asked, subtly checking the man's pupils. He shrugged.

"Sort of, it's just the usual stuff. Work here long enough and it's bound to happen. Anyway, thanks." He downed the rest of his glass, and gave the Doctor a tight smile, walking away.

The Doctor frowned after him. _Double vision? Work here long enough and you get double vision? Is that…_

A light tune played near the center of the room, drawing attention and stilling conversations. Faces turned to where Dr. Bourma stepped to a small podium, giving a quick little smile. He cleared his throat.

"Well, hello everyone! Now, today is a very a very important day for our little colony. Today Sedna has made a step that no other colony can claim; today we'll be fulfilling our goal of creating our energy with complete independence. Ahem, anyone with a white card, please follow me."

A small segment of the crowd followed Dr. Bourma down through a steel-glass door, down a ramp that led them into the lower chamber that housed the collider. The Doctor kept his mind focused on the backs of the people around him in order to ignore the small distortions in time. He might not feel them inside his bubble of absolute time, but seeing them made him a bit dizzy. The little head technician bustled them into an opaque glass room, then turned, smiling expansively.

"So, this is our imaging and viewing chamber. Only a pane of hermetically-sealed glass between us and the reaction that will free us from our dependence on Earth's fuel. When I press this button-" he held up a small red button "Sedna will take mankind into another era."

The audience clapped politely, facing the fourth wall, a clear pane of glass that abutted the collision tubes, giving a very close view. Now he could see the point just in the center where all three tubes converged, the true reaction point.

The Doctor's eyes narrowed. He watched as Bourma pushed the small button, and another blue-white beam of super-accelerated protons joined the lower. His fine jaw set as he watched the affect of the doubled acceleration spread. The singular accelerator had been bad enough, bending time-space in ways that his gut told him wasn't right. If he'd been able to analyze their working math instead of the tripe he'd been given he might have known why his instincts were telling him there was a problem. But this secondary collider made the affect so much stronger, so much worse. It was obvious now, like watching ripples spreading from a disturbance in water; something like a dolphin gone mad, maybe. As the protons were sped and collided, the energy they reached ripped at the stable, slow-changing fabric of normal time-space, loosening moments from their tightly held places in each continuum. The sound of the clapping group warped in his ears like a bad recording. He walked forward, stepping carefully. He had to walk cautiously, because the ground underfoot seemed to be moving; even the smallest bits of rock and dust had a time line, though usually the Doctor noticed them as much as he noticed the rock. But now the simple time-lines of the concrete and tiles that had been used to make the floor were twisting, making the floor into a shifting mosaic as tiles flickered in or out of existence, showed cracks or signs of wear, then the pristine white that was the present. He blinked, working to hold his balance.

The Doctor took up a place in the front of the crowd, looking at the machine with narrowed eyes. The time lines around the machine bent in ways that made his stomach turn even within his bubble of temporal grace. He stared at the lines, his eyes picking out the places where they moved fast enough to loose themselves from normal continuum, pulling moments out of place, making the air ripple sluggishly.

_And that's not going to stop here. It'll spread._

He glanced at the crowd, all quite calm. Voices wavered in the air, undulating oddly as they reached his ears from varied moments.

_How can they all miss this?_ A distant part of his mind commented._ Funny little brains they've got._

He'd seen enough. He knew what was wrong. And now it was time to tell them.

He glanced around for Jenny. She was in the very back of the crowd, arms crossed tightly over her chest. She glanced at him sharply.

_Let's get out of here._

She nodded, turning away. They were out of the room and up the ramp fast as discretion allowed, then out in the corridor. He slowed his steps to give Jenny a moment to readjust, but they couldn't spare much time. He spoke when they were reasonably far from the room.

"We need those papers, an' then we need to get to work. Something's wrong in that room, wrong enough to make my hair stand on end."

"Your hair's always on end."

"Touché, but not the point right now. How'd the key work?"

"Well sir." Jenny answered, her eyes focused straight ahead. "But it was…like you said. _Wrong._ Just-"she glanced up at him as she searched for words- " _wrong._ Still made my body react a little adversely."

"It would." The Doctor said darkly. "You'll be feeling sick because every bit in your body is telling you that this isn't the way the universe should be. Time is being stretched like a bit of rope that's fraying round the middle. And now I know what exactly's doing the fraying. We've got to prove it to them before they try to turn that third collider on and really muck up this bit of time-space. Come on."


	4. Chapter 4

4

The papers had been delivered, laid on the bed Jenny had taken. The Doctor pounced on them.

"About time!" Turning on his heel, he paced around of the room, reading as he walked. He finished with a scowl.

"Humans! They can take a simple discovery and make something threatening to their own existence out of it, every time. Every time! Find copper, make swords. Figure out fossil fuels, fill the air with poison. Do they _ever_ learn?" He glanced at two pages of figures again, and shook his head in disgust.

"Look at this! Bloody mess. Stupid bloody bumbling single-minded mess, no sense for the effects their actions have, no sense at all. Just look!" He thrust the papers at Jenny, who read through the mathematical figures showing the speeds and distances at which the protons were being moved.

"This is faster than warp-shunt technology." She noted in surprise. "Faster than transmat too. Damn. How can they keep it controlled at this speed?"

"They can't." The Doctor replied grimly, "And that's the problem. But they've let themselves believe it, with this shoddy math. This is where they're going wrong-"he jabbed a finger at the page, "Here, here and here. It's gibberish calculations, just barely holding the few good bits they've got together. Look, if you redo the math…" he whipped out a pen and scribbled down calculations-"And there. And…Oh. This is bad. Very very bad."

"How bad?" Jenny asked. Her father glanced at her sharply.

"Take how bad you think it is, and add another load of bad on top. That bad. They're accelerating particles, right?"

"Right." Jenny nodded, watching her father pace as he spoke.

"And every particle they accelerate and smash gives off energy. Waaaay too much energy. Now, you get that much energy in a small space and things start to go haywire. Timelines start being knocked loose 'cause their artron energy parts company with their matter and spins off, and that lets what we've been seeing happen; it lets slices of time-space slide into other slices, because there's no artron cross-bonding and no quantum chains to hold them in place. That's actually how you open up the planes too, enough energy in a small space to break the bonds that keep them wrapped round each other…" His dark eyes widened for a moment. But he shook his head. "Nah, they haven't got it going fast enough for that. Just fast enough to destabilize space-time. It'll start with the simplest timelines first, already has actually, then move up in complexity, start affecting the sentients…" The Doctor glared at the sheaf of papers in his hand. "Idiotic irresponsible humans! How'd they ever get out of their trees?!"

"How long's this going to take to start affecting things?" Jenny asked. The Doctor shrugged, eyes still on the paper.

"No idea. I can't tell, not with everything moving around like Disney on Ice. It's like a tear in cloth; right now they're worrying the fabric of time-space, wearing it threadbare, loosing strings all over the place. If they keep worrying at it the tear's going to get longer and wider. Might open a rift, might get so temporally scrambled that it attracts Reapers. Might just muck with this rock's infrastructure enough that it falls to bits. But I do know one thing for sure."

He looked his daughter in the eye, his face tense.

"If they turn on that third collider, it'll be like taking a pair of scissors to the fabric of reality. All bets are off on what happens then, lots of possible outcomes, and none of them pretty. We can't let that happen. I'm going to draw up these figures, redo the math and take it upstairs, see if I can't prove it to them that way. But if that doesn't work…"

He frowned to himself. Then the Doctor squared his shoulders, and gave his daughter a grim smile.

"If that doesn't work, we may have to get creative."

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

By four o'clock the rips in time and space had spread, extending misplaced moments throughout the building. Cups dropped to the floor and broken were picked up whole. Foods set down were rotted in a moment. People found themselves walking down the hall that they had already traversed. And they had begun to notice. Several people had been taken to the medical bay as they reported seeing 'ghosts', others grew nearly blind with what they thought was double vision.

By six o'clock the Doctor had shown his calculations to half the senior technicians, and each of them had read the work and rebuffed him or denied it outright. By six-thirty Jenny was wishing she hadn't promised not to hit anyone. She crumpled a page of the paper she had just tried to deliver, dropping into a chair beside her father. He glanced at her sourly.

"What'd he say?"

"Nothing useful. Wouldn't even look at it. Sorry."

"Don't be. Neither would mine. And I can't get a meeting with Bourma until after the meal." The Doctor stuck a fork into his dinner, baring his teeth in frustration. "Idiots. Bloody idiots, the lot of them."

Jenny tapped her fingers against the table. "What do we do now?"

"Well…can you not do that? Thanks. We can finish up with the rest of that lot. If we can find one who'll listen to us, just one, we'll be doing better. Otherwise, we're rather at odd ends. Best we can do is get down to the TARDIS and try to stabilize the situation, then do what we can to reroute some of the power, see if we can take some of the juice out of the reaction. And we've got to talk to Bourma again; he's their head technician, if we can convince him the problem'll be solved in no time at all. Bit of a long shot on that little ___beauraucrat_, but it's a shot worth taking, might work we'll be lucky, which is pretty rare I grant you. And then…" He sighed, raking a hand through his hair. "Then, if that doesn't work, maybe we can do a bit of midnight monkeying, tweak the machinery to slow it up. I don't want to shut it down completely, not if I don't have to. People are depending on this as a fuel source. But it's not worth their lives to have their own petrol station, so if it comes down to it…" He stared ahead, his eyes losing focus, then squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head.

"Gah, what a mess. No way to look into that." Opening his eyes, he glanced around the room.

"We're not going to get through to anymore of these blockheads tonight, and I'm tired of trying. Bourma's office, then."

Walking down the hall, Jenny glanced at the people who passed by them, huddled in small groups. Listening, her ears picked up snatches of conversation.

"How could you take three hours to get the coffee?"

"I keep telling you I was only in there for a minute! How many times do I have to say that?!!"

_It's spreading fast._

_Tell me about it._

"I swear, I swear I saw Tally walking down the hall."

"Tally went to Earth a month ago, you know that."

"I know, that's what's so weird."

Glancing over her shoulder, she absently stopped behind her father. The flash of his annoyance made her snap to attention. Her father was staring at Bourma's door, which was dark. The Doctor smacked the doorframe.

"Aah! I can't _believe_ it. He's turned in for the night. Of all the times to take the night off!" Spinning on his heel, the Doctor strode down the corridor.

"Fine. We'll snag him in the morning and shake some sense into him. Right now we've got seventeen hours before they try to turn that thing on. Let's get down to the TARDIS and get something done about the mess here."

Marching through the hall, the Doctor led the way into the stairwell, lower and lower into the building. Jenny steeled herself as they passed the second floor where the collider sat. The Doctor paused for nothing. He had it figured out, or almost figured out, she could tell by the way he moved. He was driven now.

The Doctor pushed open the TARDIS door and strode up the ramp, hands already flickering over the panels, working switches that Jenny had hardly ever seen him use. He glanced up, then took off into the corridors without a word. Jenny stared after him, her brow furrowed. Stepping up the console, she ran a hand over the time rotor.

"What's he doing?" she murmured. A ripple of warm emotion ran up her hand, comforting, but not very enlightening.

After a moment, the door opened, and her father was back, a handful of objects in his hands. He spread them out across the floor, pulling more from his pockets, glanced over them, then plucked several and hurried back to the console.

"First things first, got to stabilize these lines. Can't do anything without doing that or the whole thing might go sky high. That is if there was a sky. Got to get this straight...come on old girl. Just got to pull them back…" He stared up into the time rotor a moment, then back at the controls, hands flickering with frenetic adeptitude.

"Can I help?"

"At the moment, no, not really." Her father said, dark eyes riveted again on the time rotor. "But you can plug that doohickey into the displacement conduit. Then…"

The next hour passed without a word. Jenny took a place in the console chair, watching as the Doctor's expressive face darkened, winced and brightened while he manipulated the controls. He'd opened two panels to view monitors Jenny had never seen him use before, and his eyes flickered from them to the time rotor. By the end of the hour, his brow had creased, his body tense as he worked. His only pause was an occasional moment taken to push his glasses up his nose or mutter something under his breath.

Jenny pulled her kelosite from her pocket, focusing on it. Nothing, still nothing. Tucking it back in her pocket, she got to her feet.

"Want a cuppa?"

"No thanks." He pulled out several sheets of paper, covering them in quick, scrawling writing.

Half an hour later, Jenny stepped to his side.

"Anything I can do?"

"Nope." Her father answered, adjusting several controls. She'd only seen her father this concerned four times, and three of those four events were some of her nastiest memories. She watched him take up three wires in one hand and a harmonizing device in the other, working them simultaneously.

"I'll hold one of those if you want."

"No, I have to do most of this individually."

Jenny watched him work, trying to balance everything on his own shoulders.

"You're going to get fatigued. I can work something."

For a moment the Doctor glanced at her, taking his gaze from the monitors, eyes dark, frustrated, tense.

"Jenny, you can't help work with something you can't see. If you want to be of use go work up the siphoning calculations, we'll be needing those."

Jenny stepped back from the controls as if they had burned her. She gave a sharp nod.

"Sorry sir. I'll have those calculations ready soon."

Before her father glanced up, she was out of the room.

Neither of them slept that night. Neither of them felt the slightest bit tired. Around five o'clock the Doctor stood back with a sigh. The situation was worse than he'd thought, but he'd done what he could. The TARDIS was stretching itself awfully thin, yet it had managed to throw out lassoes and loops of relatively stable time to anchor the broken threads. It would help. But it was a tenuous cat's cradle of time, as delicate as an egg shell. Any disturbance would tear the work to bits.

He stretched luxuriously, shook himself, then glanced around the room. Jenny wasn't there. Was she still at the calculations?

Jenny was sitting in the kitchen, a bowl of cereal in one hand, a sheaf of papers in the other. She glanced at him, then back to her work.

"Okay, I got the siphoning started, pinpointed it around the current reactions rather than the stored energy down here. I think I got it to balance so they won't notice much. The TARDIS is moving kind of slow today, we should run a diagnostic when this is over. Otherwise ready for the next move." She took another bite of her breakfast, and looked her father over appraisingly.

"You should eat. You look awful."

He rolled his eyes. "Thanks. That really helps."

Jenny shrugged, wolfing down her food.

"Tea's on the counter for you. So now we go see Bourma?"

The Doctor nodded. "Yep. And won't that be a fun visit. 'Sorry, I know this is the plant's big day and all, but could you just shut it down for a bit before you punch a hole in reality?' I can imagine the response we're going to get."

"He can't be so thick that he hasn't noticed something's off." Jenny said indistinctly. The Doctor shook his head.

"Never underestimate a human's capacity to be thick, Jenny. You almost done?"

Jenny raised the bowl to her lips, draining off the last of her meal, then pushed her chair back.

"Yep. Let's go."

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Dr. Bourma bustled into his office, humming cheerily off-key. Today was going to be quite a triumph, if he did say so himself. He paused a moment to yawn; hadn't gotten much sleep last night. Probably the excitement of the day getting to him. Opening a desk drawer, he checked his appearance in the little mirror he kept there one more time. Had to look good for the holos, after all.

There was a knock on his door, and the two inspectors came striding into his office, the man holding a sheaf of papers in his hand.

"Dr. Bourma, I'd really like a word now, and this time I'm afraid it can't wait. My partner and I went through your working math last night, we found a few discrepancies that have us pretty concerned."

"Discrepancies?" Bourma squeaked. "But that's not possible. We've run and rerun the math for almost a year now."

"I'm sure you have, but I'm also pretty sure you didn't run it at the full speeds, and that's where the problem is. Look…" the young man pushed aside several of Bourma's papers, spreading the sheaf he held across the desk. He pointed at several calculations. "Here, and here, and here. These figures, once they got redone a bit, they predict some pretty nasty outcomes at anything over this speed. If you turn on that third collider, see, you'll destabilize the quantum bonds for most of the matter, and not just in the reaction chamber. Here, have a look." He pushed over the papers. Bourma studied them. The calculations were strange, eccentric, even, but he could see what they predicted. Twenty miles of atomic destabilization due to the increase of energy between particles. For a moment, he stared at the figures. Could this be…

"This is impossible." He blustered, pushing the paper aside. "This just can't be right. We've run tests, we've worked it over, and none of the twenty senior technicians I've had the honor to work with has ever expressed findings anything like this."

"Yes I know that." The man across his desk said, exasperated, "I've already talked with your technicians. But look, it wasn't hard to miss the way you were going about it. If I'm right-and I'm always right-then this third collider would at least kill a lot of people in your town, and that's at the very least. It could get a lot worse. I'm showing you this because I'm asking you to postpone turning the collider on, just until I can go through the figures with a few of your fellows and work out the kinks. Call it technical difficulties, call it anything, just put this off until it can be done right."

Bourma looked into the man's dark eyes- and looked away again. He ran a hand over his mustache.

"Well, I see no reason to postpone such a momentous occasion on the basis of a few new calculations, especially since they are the work of an amateur…"

"_Amateur_?" The dark-haired inspector stared at him, his eyebrows high. Bourma nodded.

"Yes, well really, what credentials, exactly, would a general inspector have?"

"How about experience?"  
Bourma crossed his arms. "You have prior experience with quantum theory and sub-atomic particle calculations?"

"Trust me." His blonde assistant said, "He's probably got more experience than your senior technicians put together."

"And experience tells me that if you do this, people are going to die. Do you really want a planet-wide Three-Mile-Island because you're a bit impatient?"

Bourma ran a hand over his balding head. "I don't…do you have anything else to back up your claims?"

"Oh loads. Look around." The man said earnestly. "The earthquakes, the sicknesses filling up your medical quarters, strange things happening at every turn, when did it start? Five or six weeks ago. When did you start testing the next collider? Five or six weeks ago. Don't you see?"

Bourma's little eyes narrowed. He'd heard that speech before, heard it often from critics and protestors.

"What I see" he snapped, "is two inspectors taking a great deal of authority on their shoulders. What would your superiors say?"

"And what will they say when we tell them that you blatantly ignored our recommendations?" the young woman asked sharply. "Maybe they'll say this facility needs a change in staffing, or complete closure."

Dr. Bourma stood up, his mustache bristling. "How dare you!" he spluttered. "How dare you walk in here and try to threaten me! How dare you try to interfere with a groundbreaking project! Now I have no more time to waste on this nonsense, I have a very important day ahead of me and I need to-"

"Will you listen to me, you little hysteric?" the man nearly shouted, leaning across the desk. "If you go on with this, people are going to _die._ Your coworkers. Your neighbors. Unless you stop this now."

For a moment, the two men stared at each other across the desk, eye to eye. The inspector's eyes bored into his, those great, dark, cold eyes. He swallowed.

"I'm not shutting down this program under any circumstances."

The dark-haired man drew back, standing to his full height. He towered over the technician, who suddenly, for all his age and his important position, felt very small.

"Then I'll have to make you."

Then the man turned, nodded to his assistant, and swept out of the room.

After the door closed Dr. Bourma sat for a moment, staring, his breathing harsh in his ears. Then his mustache began to bristle, his face darkening.

"How…how _dare_ they?!" he spluttered to himself. "How _dare _they! The _nerve_! In my own office…_hysteric_!! Oh, I'll show them!"

He snatched the phone from his desk, and snapped into it.

"Rata, get me our contact in the Tri-Sol Energy ___Beauru_. I want to speak with one of their head inspectors. Now!"

After a moment of impatient waiting, the little man shot into animated speech.

"Hello? Who's this? Well, Inspector Eveas, I have a serious matter to discuss with you. Two of your inspectors have been seriously overstepping their bounds at the facility I run. They've been upsetting my staff and now they've gone so far as to insult…My facility base? Sedna. Now-you what? You WHAT?!! Oh no no no, you must be mistaken, they have badges and…are you sure?!! Well, well thank you very much. Now I've got to go." He slammed down the long distance phone and picked up a small radio.

"Trakel! Trakel, get your Watchers together this instant! Those two inspectors are a pair of frauds. I want them arrested and in the cells before they can cause any more problems today. I mean right now, do you hear?!!"

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Jenny marched beside her father, their feet eating up the corridor. "We bollocksed that, didn't we?"

"Yep." The Doctor said shortly.

"We got a plan B?"

"Nope."

"We going to do something?"

"Yep. And fast."

"Good." They were on the second floor now, and her hand clutched unconsciously around her key.

"Is it me or is it-"

"A lot worse, yep. We need…" The Doctor froze, staring in the direction of the reaction chamber. He dug both hands into his pockets, pulling out a small device and his sonic screwdriver. He held the sonic screwdriver up, then placed the tip on the device. His eyes widened.

"Oh, every time I think this can't get any worse it does…maybe…oh no. Faster than…Oh no no no no…Jenny, we've got to get down to the TARDIS right now and…"

But Jenny wasn't listening. She was staring up the corridor, her brow furrowed.

"Ah, Father…"

Then he heard it. The sound of feet on the corridor floor.

"Ah. Right, time to…"

Jenny turned on her heel. Too late. The corridor on either end was filled with red-clad guards, their long weapons held out in front of them like spears. Father and daughter moved in, back to back.

"Back to square one." Jenny muttered, ramrod straight.

Beside her, her father's eyes ran over the crowd of guards. Far too many to fight, too many to slip by, and there was absolutely no time for this. His eyes flickered, searching for an exit.

"Jenny." He murmured quietly, "You still got that kelosite?"

Jenny nodded, eyes fixed on the guards.

"Pull it out."

She glanced at him sharply. But she put her hand into her jean pocket, and pulled out the small pebble.

"Good." The Doctor said softly. "Hold it out. And shut your eyes."

The hallway lit up in a blast of white fluorescence that made spots dance behind her eyes. A hand grabbed hers, and a voice rang in her ear.

"Run!"

They took off blindly down the corridor, Jenny blinking as her eyes cleared. Apparently they cleared faster than the guards', as they were still reeling. Her father shot her a grin as they dashed.

"Brilliant! Now all we need is-" his sentence ended in a gasp, and his hand ripped out of hers. Jenny spun on her heel, backhanding the guard who had her father by the waist. Someone grabbed at her, and she kicked out, impacting with a solid crack. Two guards had her father by the arms now, and Jenny turned on them, but another enemy was at her back. She lashed out, whirling, limbs flying. They must have called reinforcements, because there were definitely more than there had been. Leg to head, block that pole, and that one, quick punch, roundhouse, rabbit punch…

"Jenny!"

Jenny spun around, kicking another guard's pole out of the way.

"I'm coming!"

"No!" the Doctor yelped, "Jenny, get out of here! Get to the TARDIS, find the calculations for…" He wrestled with the guard, and Jenny was hit with a maelstrom of information, numbers and images flashing in front of her eyes, almost knocking her off her fighting stance.

"Now run! Run!!"

_**A soldier obeys orders.**_

Jenny took off down the corridor, barreling through the guards. She was dashing flat out, down the corridors, down stairs, through the halls. There was the door to the lower chamber. There was the TARDIS, the only thing that was real and stable in this whole place. She crashed inside, slamming the door behind her. She leaned against it, catching her breath.

_Okay, in a minute Father will be here, and then…._

The sound of the ship made her head shoot up. The time rotor moved, giving off its creakingly ethereal noise. Jenny's eyes widened.

"What the hell?! Why are you moving?! Don't move!" She raced up to the console, pulling levers, inputting calculations that instantly changed. The rotor moved faster, Jenny staring at it in shock.

"No!"


	5. Chapter 5

5

"No, no no! Take us back!" Jenny frantically input calculations, pressing buttons and levers desperately. She even tried to pull the handbrake, despite the danger of doing it inside the Vortex. But the controls were unresponsive under her hands, and the calculations changed.

"Take us back!" she exclaimed as she fought the ship, "Go back, take us back! If he gets loose he won't be able to find us! Come _on_, we need to go _back_!"

She bared her teeth, giving the console base a kick. "Damn it, listen to me!!"

A current of annoyance and distracted displeasure rippled through her mind like a headache, a feeling akin to '_settle down'_.

"I'm not calming down!" Jenny shouted, "Father's in trouble and we need to go, we need to go now!" She laid her hands on the console again. This time blue energy sparked from the controls, shocking her fingers. She yelped.

"God damn you!!"

Breathing hard, she stared at the unresponsive controls. After a long moment, she took a breath, relaxing her clenched fists.

"Fine. We're not moving. What do you want me to do exactly?"

Nothing, save a quiet sense of encouragement. She stood still, staring at the time rotor.

_What am I supposed to do?_

She paced around the rotor, thinking. _The figures. He told me to find the calculations he gave me. But what do I do with a load of calculations?_

_Father wouldn'tve given me something useless. _

_Okay. He gave me calculations. Find those calculations, see what information's attached to them. Maybe it'll give me some way to stop what's happening._

"Okay, fine." Stepping to the main monitor, she tapped the keys, opening the data banks.

"You and Father better know what you're doing."

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

The Doctor stumbled as he was shoved into the cell. The two women and the young man looked up sullenly. The skinny man laughed.

"Hey, look who's back."

The Doctor spared the three people a quick glance, and sighed. "You people again."

Stepping to the wall, he leaned against it, running a hand through his hair. What to do now?

Jenny must have made it to the TARDIS, since he hadn't seen her in any of the cells they'd passed, and couldn't feel her anywhere at hand. That was all right then. The TARDIS was programmed to move itself away from any temporal event that was possibly dangerous to it, so it would be keeping her safe while she sorted out the calculations and attached algorithms that would allow stabilization of the mess and a safe shut-down of the colliders.

It was all a matter of timing now. If Jenny could get the calculations fast enough, if they could get to the chamber before the third collider was started and prevent it, if they could close the rips in time-space before they developed into rifts…

Jenny would be working as fast as she could, though she'd likely waste a few moments trying to ride in like the cavalry coming, hot blooded as she was. He wished he could have explained more thoroughly, but there hadn't exactly been time. He could only hope she was working as fast as possible by now.

Fast as they could. Fast as possible. The particle speeds he'd picked up in the hall had already been above the speeds the scientists had calculated, at the very limit of his own calculated predictions. When they ramped that up, whatever was going to happen would be fast.

_Only if they ramp it up. Only if you let that happen. Though how you're going to stop it from inside a cell is a puzzle. No way out of this cell either. Sealed, deadlocked, and this stuff doesn't resonate much. Oh you've really done it this time._

"Hey guys! Check this out!"

The Doctor glanced up, watching the young man stare at his own arm as he waved it. Eccentricities in time roiled up in the wake of the movement, making his arm seem to leave bright after-images in the air. Those were so blatant that apparently even humans could see them. The Doctor frowned.

_Great. Now it's getting in here too._

He shut out the human's babbling, focusing on Time. Here the fabric was still basically stable, just beginning to warp and knot. He could see the pattern much more clearly here, though not as clearly as he would have liked. There were several timelines that showed Sedna blasting apart into rocks and dust, destabilized beyond repair. Some showed rifts swallowing the planet, pitching it willy-nilly across the universe. Lots of deaths down those roads too. There had to be some line that didn't end in death. He closed his eyes, looking deeper. His brow wrinkled.

_Now what's this?_

Several lines had no clear point for the resolution of the situation. Instead, only a bright node of Time shone, a point that seemed to have no cause and no effect. The Doctor looked closer. Those spaces didn't seem to be attached to anything. They were like gaps in the middle of the timelines. Why would there be a gap in time-space?

Gap in time. Gap in reality. The Doctor's eyes flew open.

"I thought it was too slow for that." He murmured, shocked. "I was wrong. Oh, I was so wrong."

"Hey, you okay man?"

The Doctor turned half dazedly to the young woman.

"No, I'm afraid I'm not. And I'm afraid that none of us are going to be for long."

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Jenny dropped a book to the floor, grabbing another from the shelf. Nothing. Still nothing. She'd read through all the sections of the database that ought to have had information like what she was looking for, speeding through the circular shapes and patterns that formed Gallifreyan shorthand. Giving up on that, she'd taken off for the second library, where most of the scientific books were. Still nothing that matched the images in her head, and that was the last of the books that was even remotely related to quantum mechanics or time-space. She sighed.

_What now?_

Glancing at the door, she crossed her arms, trying to think. Then she stepped out into the hall. The TARDIS usually knew where things were. So if she let the ship choose the next door she went through, maybe she'd have better luck. She stood still in the center of the hall, her eyes shut.

_I need this stuff._ She thought out, picturing the figures her father had imparted to her mind. She took a few steps forward, and opened her eyes. The door to the first library was in front of her. Jenny cocked her head.

"The first library?" she said into the air. The door creaked open. That was about as blatant as it got. So Jenny jogged inside.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………

The Doctor kicked the wall. Completely ineffectual, he knew, but he kicked it again anyway.

_I don't have time for this!!_

"Hey man, cool off!"

The Doctor ignored the human, dark eyes flickering again over the walls of his cell. There was no way out. Absolutely no way out. But he couldn't give up. Couldn't.

A Schism. He couldn't believe that these humans had managed to form an Untempered Schism here. Completely uncontrolled, of course, and about as stable as Pompeii. But still, a Schism. And he'd sent Jenny right into the middle of it armed with calculations. If she looked into it, with a mind that was nearly mature, it could drive her mad. It had done that often enough under ideal circumstances. No one had ever waited until adulthood to look into the Schism. For all he knew it could kill her.

His daughter, maimed. Or dead. The possibilities were there…

He had to get out. Had to get to her.

Time was warping further in the little cell. He could see the lines in the polyporcelain wavering and unraveling, giving a rippling effect to the wall. If they would thin enough he could step through…but if they thinned that much they were all in trouble. And the warped time was giving him a headache.

Well maybe he could fix that at least. He looked at the wall, trying to pick out the failing lines-but something caught his attention. He turned towards the cell door.

_Something's different._

_Something's changing._

_Somebody made a decision…and it's changing outcomes…now what…"_

The cell door opened, and Technician Cranz stepped in, followed by an older man with thinning black hair.

"Inspector-er, Mr. Smith? We'd like to talk to you about your findings."

"Really." The Doctor said sarcastically, "You mean somebody actually took a moment to _read_ them then?"

The young technician half-nodded nervously. "Erm, well yes, I did, and I showed them to Dr. Simms here, he's one of our senior technicians, and-"

"Frankly," the older man interrupted, "you do very interesting work, sir, and I don't mind to say it rather made my hair stand on end. Where exactly have you worked on these sort of projects before?"

The Doctor shrugged. "Couple of places. You wouldn't know them. And thanks for the praise, but if you paid attention to the work at all you'll notice that it predicts our deaths in-what, half an hour?"

"Twenty-five minutes, actually." The older man said cheerfully, "Which is why we're breaking you out."

For a moment, the Doctor stared from one of them to the other, nonplussed.

"You're what?"

"Getting you out of here. I always knew there were places in our math that were faulty, and yours is the first work I've ever seen to make it come together. Of course it makes our answers all wrong, but still, marvelous!"

"Well thanks." The Doctor said in a tone that was almost casual, "Always nice when somebody notices me being brilliant. But-"

"The thing is," Cranz cut in earnestly, "Something's….just _off_ here. I didn't know what it was, I still don't really, but I was sent up to the Head's office for something, and I saw the papers, started to read them a bit and…well, it all makes sense, all tallies up with what's been happening here. And the stuff at the end, the stuff about what happens if we break the Kuzman limit…"

"Not a pleasant thought, is it?" the Doctor asked quietly. Both men looked at him as if they half hoped he'd say 'sorry, just joking!' How he wished he could.

The younger man took a step closer, eccentricities lighting up his body as he moved.

"What's really happening here, inspector-er, Mister…"

"Call me the Doctor, make life easier. Can we start walking? Twenty five minutes, you know."

The older man smiled wanly.

"Right this way."

The Doctor walked between the two technicians, out the door and down the hall. He wasn't even going to ask how they'd convinced the guard on duty; there wasn't time.

"What's going on is that your machine is ripping holes in the time-space fabric, just like my calculations show; loosening the bonds that hold the universe together. What you're seeing, what you're feeling is a side effect of time space falling apart at the seams right here. But it's worse than that, worse by quite a bit, I realized while I was cooling my heels. You've also loosened the bonds that bind planes of existence, you call them dimensions, that bind the eleven dimensions of existence together and hold nine of them rolled up tight inside the other five. Remember what the first Hadron colliders were designed to do, make all eleven dimensions visible? Well, congratulations, you lot have managed it on a grand scale. And when that thing turns on, you're going to pull those bindings right off, and you'll end up with a spot in space where all eleven dimensions will be open. A gap in reality, a tear in the fabric of existence. And guess what nature does when it sees a hole? Tries to fill it, because it's completely unstable and there's no one here with the ability to hold it steady, and fills it with whatever matter is nearest at hand."

They stepped into the elevator, the Doctor talking as he watched the numbers rise. "Within half an hour of the third collider turning on, everything for a good three hundred miles around will be broken into atoms and used to close the gap you opened. So unless you want that to happen, here's what needs doing; we need to get everyone out of that reaction chamber, we need to stop that collider from turning on, and you two have to show me where you control your coolant systems, your emission lengths, reactors and your colliders. I'm going to shut them down; you'll have plenty of power to live on from your stores in the basement until it can be reworked properly. Can you do that?" He glanced from one man to the other. Cranz stared at him with wide eyes.

"But how do you know all this? I mean, you're not really an inspector, are you? How do you know what's wrong and what to do with it? Where'd you learn?"

The Doctor turned to the young man, meeting his eyes.

"I learned a long way and a very long time from here. I know because I can feel it, right down deep in my guts. I'm a Time Lord. It's my place to see Time, and my responsibility to protect it. What you've done here is damaging this section of time-space irrevocably, unweaving the pattern of the universe just a little, and that can't be allowed. I'm bound to put it right."

The elevator dinged, and the Doctor gave the men a small, grim smile, his hands in the pockets of his trench coat.

"So, gentlemen. Ready to save the planet?"

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

There weren't that many scientific, TARDIS-related, or technical manuals in the first library. Jenny loped in the direction of their shelves. But today Marnal Gates's books were in their place. Odd. The ship usually didn't move bookcases around. But she didn't have time for this. She spun on her heel.

"I said I needed the figures." Her voice reverberated hollowly in the wide, dusky room.

There. She found the technical manuals, and leafed through them, throwing copies to the floor. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Her fingernails dug into her palms.

Fine. Science books next. She took off between the stacks. But there were Marnal Gates's books again, sitting where the science shelf should be.

"These aren't any help. I've read almost all of them. They -"

A word rode into her mind on a wave of emotion that was half exasperation and half eagerness.

_Almost_

Jenny glanced at the books, eyebrows raised. But the TARDIS was adamant. She ran her fingers over the tomes. There were only three she hadn't read. She touched the spine of 'Low Town and Environs; a day's guide', then 'From Loom to Pyre'. The book nearly fell into her hands. Jenny stared at it, perplexed. The Doctor had said it mostly had to do with schools and the education system on Gallifrey, which hadn't caught her interest. But the ship was basically shoving it into her hands. She flipped the book open, and began to read. Then Jenny froze. Flipping back a page, she read the passage again. And over again. Her eyes continued to scan words, but her mind, for all its speed and dexterity, simply couldn't grasp them.

'Untempered Schism.

A small space in which the atomic properties have been thwarted through the acceleration of matter, in which-' Jenny's eyes scanned the numbers and figures. A perfect match. '-allowing a perfect viewing of the entirety of space-time in all its eleven planes. The Untempered Schism, situated just outside the Capitol, has long been the site at which a young Time Lord enters society. Once each Generation, loomlings seven years of age are watched diligently for signs of budding temporal awareness. In the next year those who show promise will be taken to stand before the Untempered Schism, allowed to gaze into its endless depths. There they will see the full pattern of Time, and their minds will be for once and for all time opened to the awareness of its movements and vagaries without which sight they should never come to understand. The viewing of such colossal import can cause one of three reactions. Children staring into the Schism will see the endless expansion of wonders, and be inspired. These are the innovators, creators and craftsmen of our people. Some children will feel the responsibility for all Time and Existence resting on their young shoulders, and flee from it. Despite this childhood fear, such children traditionally become great leaders and influential members of society. And some children will be overwhelmed by the sheer power and lose their minds, in whole or in part, temporarily or completely. These ones are not suitable for the Academy.'

Below that were several pages of history. They detailed the fact that several attempts to set up a Schism were attempted before successful, and gave detailed explanations of the mistakes made and the methods used to shut the holes in reality before they caused damage. That was the important part. Tucking the book in her satchel, Jenny took off down the corridors. After a stop in two rooms, she pelted for the control room, stuffing the necessary tools into her satchel. She dashed up the ramp.

"I know what to do now, so let's get back there and do it!"

Nearly every part of her was focused on the suddenly pliant controls, on the figures for the rip in reality-schism, it was called a schism- and what she needed to do. But in the back of her mind, the words of the book repeated.

_they will see the full pattern of Time, and their minds will be for once and for all time opened to the awareness of its movements and vagaries, without which sight they should never come to understand._

_Does it mean…_

_without which sight they should never come to understand._

_Father told me I'd grow into my Time sense. _

_without which sight they should never come to understand._

_Why'd he lie to me?_

_they will see the full pattern of Time, and their minds will be for once and for all time opened to the awareness…_

_A schism. If I look into it…. Maybe, maybe…_

_their minds will be for once and for all time opened to the awareness…_

_First priority has got to be stabilizing it and stopping everything from going to hell…but maybe…_

Jenny's hands danced over the controls. For the first time, they were almost shaking.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Technician Cranz pushed through the crowd. There were twice as many people at this ceremony as there had been yesterday, filling the room with chatter and laughter. He nodded absently to acquaintances who tried to catch his eye, pushing on. What he was going to do he had absolutely no idea. How could he get this many people to move before Dr. Bourma's speech?

Maybe he could get a few of the Watchers, tell them that somebody had ordered him to clear the room. Were there any Watchers here?

The amplified sound of a throat clearing made the young technician turn, eyes wide. Dr. Bourma was standing at his podium, smiling over the crowd.

"Ahem, welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to this auspicious moment. Today we will…"

Cranz's gut clenched. _Oh shit. He's starting early. He's actually starting early._

He shoved at the mingling crowd, trying to get through. But there were so many people, all packed together.

"A very important day, a day that will go down in the history of the solar system as…"

He elbowed his way between a reporter and a burly older man. But he was headed for the side wall of the reaction deck. That was wrong, he needed to head for the door. He tried yelling, but Bourma's amplified lecture drowned him out.

"Someday such achievements may allow us to reach out and stride among those distant stars…"

A large couple bumped into him, knocking him into the back wall. His glasses, where were his glasses? He dropped to his knees, fingers skittering over the tiles.

"And most honored to have worked with such…"

There. Glasses back on. Cranz stood, scanning the room desperately. On his podium, the head technician smiled, his little chest puffing out.

"And so, let's step into that next chapter of history!"

Amid cheers and applause, he pressed the button. Cranz gulped.

A sensation crept over him, as if all the air were slowly leaving the room. His vision swam, and he leaned against the wall, knees nearly buckling. His hand gripped at an oblong jutting from the wall.

Then Cranz's brain kicked in again, telling him what his hand was on. He glanced down, and gave a laugh that was drowned in the babble of the room. The fire alarm. He had his hand on the fire alarm. So he did the one thing his brain could process. He smashed its lever down.

The whoop of the alarm resounded through the room, ringing in his ears, turning the genteel crowd into a bewildered flock.

"Fire!" he shouted, "Fire, everybody out!"

Like a herd stampeded, the crowd started to move, everyone running and shoving for the door. Cranz threw himself into the throng, doing his best to hold his balance.

_The bloody thing's on._ He thought as he was jostled, _but at least I did this._

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Two floors up, the Doctor's body went stiff as a ramrod. Dr. Simms glanced at him. "Anything wrong?"

"Your friend's muffed it. The third collider's on. We've got to move. Come on! You manage those coolant systems, I'll take the emissions." He leapt over to a control panel, fingers and brain racing as he figured out the workings on the fly, tried anything that made the situation feel more stable.

"Kick those coolant systems as high as they go!" he said sharply, eyes flickering over the panels. He leaned over, pulling levers on what he desperately hoped were the right panels.

"Coolant at maximum." Dr. Simms replied breathlessly. He still hadn't recovered from their dash up here.

"Good, then program it to stay that way! How do you set this thing to hold its settings?

"You lock the station into automatic. It's the third button on the-"

The Doctor hit the third button on the left, spinning on his heel.

"Right, where are your reactors controlled?"

"The reactor controls are downstairs in the reaction chamber's anteroom."

"Tell me how to shut them off."

"It's a three stage process." The technician gasped, "First you've got to turn off the convectors, then the stream manipulator, then the power source."

"And the colliders, how do I turn those off?"

"When we get down there…"

"No." the Doctor said quickly. "I'll take care of this. Just tell me how to do it."

"You've never worked with this system."

"I'm fast to catch on." The Doctor said, his wide eyes on the technician's. "Tell me and I'll understand, then I want you to get out and take as many people as you can with you."

For a moment, the man stared at him.

"I think I have a schematic here."

The Doctor gave the man a grin.

"Brilliant."

……………………………………………………………………………………………………

The rotor stilled, and Jenny dashed for the door. They'd landed in the wide, rounded hall of the second floor. The minute Jenny stepped off the lintel she was swamped in a wave of vertigo that made her double over. Sucking in a breath, she forced herself upright.

_It's worse. So much worse. I'm too late, they've started the damn thing._

_**A soldier carries missions to conclusion.**_

_Okay. It's on. But I can still shut it down before it causes damage. Just got to get moving…_

She took two steps, and shook her head. Then she broke into a trot that quickly became a run. Her awareness narrowed down to pinpoint clarity, the precision of battle. Get to the controls. Stabilize. Shut the system down. Survive.

Skidding past a few people running in the opposite direction, Jenny barreled into the reaction chamber. She leapt over the railing of the upper ramp, landing hard on the floor. She nearly overbalanced, her stomach roiling. But she had work to do. She had a mission to carry out.

_Next step. Like it said._

_**The mission is all important.**_

Pulling out the necessary tools, Jenny strode to the points that had to be fixed. She stared up at the collision rings.

_Swing up, detach that and that, then reattach this…_Even as she thought, her eyes strayed to the small opaque glass room that concealed the reaction point. The Schism.

_But if I do it, that'll disintegrate. _She glanced back up at the colliders towering over her head. _Do I have time?_

Her gaze strayed back to the room, eyes pensive.

_Do I have time? It said you have to look into it._

_Looking into it. How long does it take?_

_And after…I could go crazy. Might go crazy. If I'm incapacitated afterwards …I can't afford incapacitation._

_**Incapacitation will result in failure of the mission**_

_I'd be unable to fulfill this action if I…_

Her eyes roved over the colossal machine. _ It's a one in three chance. If I go nuts…_

_But if I don't…_

Frozen, Jenny stood stock-still on the pristine floor, hands clenched at her sides. In her head, minutes ticked by.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The Doctor was running flat out, his coat flapping behind him like the wings of a hawk. Skidding into the anteroom, he launched himself at the panels. The controls swam in front of his eyes, shifting as various moments of the continuum gained and lost dominance. He forced his concentration to the present moment, holding for dear life to the necessary controls, working them, stabilizing the forming schism. Nearly every ounce of his concentration was taken up in the workings. Sweat beaded his brow as he fought to keep the bile in his stomach, ignore the unnatural twisting of time-space.

_It all has to work in tandem-that there, that there, and set it to shut down simultaneously-give it five minutes-no, give it six. Got to have enough time…_

The calculations were set. The Doctor took off at a sprint for the reaction chamber, though every instinct in his body screamed at him to run in the opposite direction. He fought past the pain in his head, the roiling in his stomach as Time twisted into perverted shapes and matter did things nature never intended. He skidded into the room, hearts beating like a pair of drums in his chest. He scrabbled at the controls, risking a glance at the Schism.

There was a figure standing on the reaction-chamber floor, silhouetted in the roiling mass of Time surrounding the tear that had been made in reality. Perfectly pale, perfectly still. The time-space eccentricities rippled eerily around her, outlining her timelines in weird half-snatches.

The Doctor's gut clenched

"Jenny!"

Jenny glanced over her shoulder, her eyes wide. "It's a schism, Father!"

She had read about the Schism. And from the look on her face, she'd read what it did as well. Where'd she found that information?

The eccentricities illumined her porcelain face in a shifting half-light. She was in the worst possible place. If anything went wrong… The Doctor clutched the necessary controls, fighting them as he shouted at his daughter.

"Jenny, get away from it!"

Jenny glanced at the door, then back up at her father. Time seemed to congeal. He ached to run down there, get her out of the way. But letting go of the controls meant risking the schism imploding or unraveling further.

"Jenny!" he shouted, "Jenny, you don't know what it'll do to you!"

Jenny nodded

"I know!" She turned back towards the door. His daughter. It could destroy her.

"Jenny!!!" The Doctor shouted, his voice raw. His daughter turned, and he held her eyes across the room. The Doctor spoke. "You don't have to do this."

For a long moment, Jenny stared at him, her face remote, her great blue eyes hopeful, fearful, determined. Her timelines were dancing, changing. And the Doctor watched as they, irrevocably, set into a new pattern. Her future.

"I know that." she called. Then she turned, and dashed into the viewing-chamber.


	6. Chapter 6

6

The door of the viewing chamber closed behind Jenny, if it did close, without a sound. Light. Light rippled over the walls, the floor seemed to be made of light now, undulating as if below water. Jenny stared at the floor for a long moment. Then she squared her shoulders, and raised her eyes.

Where there had been a glass sphere shot through with proton beams, there was now a point of light, cradled in efflorescent arms of brilliance that made all other things dark by comparison. The light seemed to pulse, to breathe. Jenny stepped forward. The light was so perfect. It couldn't be real. And yet it was the most _real_ thing Jenny had ever seen. She stared, enthralled by the light, eyes riveted on the central point.

Was she moving, or was the room? She felt like she was falling, falling into the light. Or was it flowing into her? Her head tingled, then nearly burned, like a fire being kindled, like a flower suddenly opening to the sun. Her blue eyes opened wide as the light glowed in them, seeing it, seeing beyond it, seeing through it.

It was as if she'd lived her entire existence on a single thread, and now the light was carrying her high, high up, and she could see the pattern of the entire tapestry, the complete and beautiful perfection of it. Endless events, every moment and everything in creation going through its existence. And each of them, each atom and microbe and creature and star contributed itself to the pattern from the moment it came into existence. Jenny laughed, barley aware that it was her own voice, laughed in realization of the sheer _beauty. _She saw the Universe, all of it, all things in all times, all things as they were meant to be. And the Universe saw _her_; recognized her, and, in some way, she felt it acknowledged her, like that perfect light had reached out and touched her, marked her, _knew her._ She was a part of the pattern, in every move affecting it, helping it _be._ Eternity blazed inside her, colors danced behind her eyes, and she was a part of it all. All times, all places, all things.

It was. And so, she was.

It could have been a moment or a year, or a hundred years, when Jenny's hand touched something. Iron, hematite, and brass.

_Doorknob._

Her hand turned it almost on reflex. Her eyes took in their last sight of perfection.

Closing the door between herself and the Schism was like cutting a cord. Jenny fell back against the wall, eyes huge, chest heaving as if she'd run fifteen miles at top speed. She stared at the room around her. And now she could _see. _Overlaid in her vision was the pattern, but now she was up close, looking at all the individual threads. And her hearts nearly broke, because the pattern was _wrong_ here. Not the perfect intricacy she'd just seen, but a tangled skein that had lost its cohesion and beauty.

_It's broken. I knew it before. But now I can see it. _

"Jenny!"

She looked up, and saw her father. Really saw him, for the first time; saw who and what he was. The patterns woven around him were delicate and complex, twisting, winding, beautiful. He'd woven himself right into Time, and now he glowed in her eyes, a knot that held so many things together. Whatever lines fell near his seemed to pull themselves straight, as if her father kept them in harmony just by being. She was so entranced by the sight that she almost forgot he had spoken. She smiled up at him, meeting his eyes, made so dark by fear.

"It's all right Dad! It's…perfect!"

The Doctor's hands gripped the railing with white knuckles. But he spoke calmly, quietly.

"Come up here, Jenny."

Jenny nodded. It was a strange new thing walking, seeing the effect her part of the pattern-was that a time line? So that was what it looked like- had on every line she came in contact with. But they had a problem here. The pattern was broken here. She didn't have time to be lagging. She jumped the stairs two at a time, reaching her father's side.

For a long moment, the Doctor couldn't help pausing to stare at her, anxious eyes scanning every nuance of her face, every emotion in her deep blue eyes. He brushed fingers lightly across her brow, brushing his thoughts through her mind. She smiled up at him. And she glowed, inside and out, so full of wonder and exhilarated joy. He smiled, then grinned in relief.

"Jenny, you up to giving your old man a hand?"

"What do I do?"

"Follow me, I'll guide you."

Jenny nodded. She followed the images her father let her see, working the controls. He had a countdown going in his head too.

_One minute…fifty-five seconds…_

She dialed up two controls, and pulled a lever. The lines were changing. Was that because of what she was doing?

_It's like he told me. Every action affects Time. Everything we do changes the lines._

_Forty seconds…thirty-nine…thirty eight…_

Now the broken lines seemed to be roiling together close to the Schism. It made her sick to look at them, so she kept her eyes to her work. But she could see them in her head, as ripped and raw as open wounds.

_Fifteen…_

Following his lead, she pulled three switches. Then it was as if the air in the room suddenly lost its chest-constricting pressure. The whole space breathed out, the terrible tension gone.

Jenny stood back from the controls. "It's done, isn't it?"

"It's done." her father agreed. He drew a deep breath, sighing out all the fear and tension of the past hours. Then he stepped away from the controls, and enveloped his daughter in a tight hug.

"Do you ever listen to me?" he asked. She smiled against his coat.

"Only when you're making sense."

He drew back, searching her face again, studying it.

"You're all right. You're all there and all straight."

She grinned up at him, her face alight. And deep in her eyes, he thought he could just see a glint of gold.

"I'm fine father. I feel…perfect."

The Doctor squeezed her into another hug. He'd been so afraid, so afraid. But here she was, glowing like a little star in her denims and her Aerosmith t-shirt, already becoming acclimatized to Time, already gaining intricacy in her lines. With a last squeeze he stepped back and looked over the room, one arm around his daughter's shoulders. The Doctor grimaced. The broken timelines, without the Schism pulling at them, hung like snapped puppet strings.

"Bit of a mess it left, didn't it?"

Jenny nodded. "Nasty."

"Mm, that about sums it up." he muttered, eyes roving over the room. He sighed. "Well," the Doctor exclaimed resolutely, "looks like your first lesson on timelines is going to be repair work. Lots to do." He glanced at his daughter, and smiled.

"Let's get at it then."

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Three days later, their work was almost done. The Doctor and his daughter had closed every proto-rift they'd been able to track down, and pulled straight the timelines as best as could be done. The Doctor had explained that the area would always be a little weak, but it would heal like wounds scarring over. The work was exhausting, but Jenny's hearts beat a little faster every time she was able to see a problem in Time and fix it. There'd been a lot of talking too. An awful lot. The Doctor had explained everything to the technicians, showing them how to safely produce power without repeating their error. He'd also had Jenny surreptitiously install a few sensors that would alert the TARDIS if anything like this started to happen again. Just in case.

They were just stepping into the TARDIS when Technician Cranz came running up, puffing.

"Doctor, Ms. Good, I was told you were leaving."

"Yep" the Doctor said, "you heard right."

The sandy-haired man nodded. "Well, I just wanted to say, thanks. From all of us. The reports-"

"Ah ah."The Doctor cut in, "Remember what you lads said, no reports about us."

"No, no reports. I was just going to say that the reports have gone out on Doctor Simms and how he saved the facility. He's going to be the Head Technician now. Bourma's stepping down."

"Brilliant."The Doctor said, "Malto bene. And I suppose you'll be doing quite well too, as long as you lot don't figure out some other way to blow yourselves to bits. Try and see that doesn't happen, hey?"

The thin young man nodded, smirking sheepishly. "I'll do that."

He shook hands with the Doctor, and with Jenny, before they stepped into their ship.

"Right, Jenny."The Doctor said, tossing his coat at the hat-rack and bounding up the ramp, "We've got something really fun to go to."

"What?" Jenny asked, hanging up her satchel. Her father shrugged, leaning his long frame against the console.

"Don't know, that's your choice. Old tradition, Initiates get to choose something to celebrate their Viewing if they come through it all right. And not only did you come through it with flying colors, you jumped right into doing temporal repairs afterwards. And to me that says vacation much deserved. So, where and when?"

Jenny walked up the ramp, a smile playing over her lips. For a second, she could only stare at the timelines swirling around the time rotor. Her father cleared his throat, and she shot him a mock glare. "Give me a minute father. All I really want right now is something to eat. I'm starved." She checked a calculation, then straightened. "Well, that's something. Pizza. Let's go for pizza."

The Doctor raised an incredulous brow. "You want to celebrate the biggest event in your life to date with pizza?"

Jenny nodded, grinning. "Yep."

The Doctor sighed dramatically.

"Your wish is my command, I suppose. Best pizza in the Universe, coming up."

He pulled the handbrake, and they shot into the Vortex. Jenny missed several beats because she was too busy watching the weavings of Time, finally seeing how the TARDIS manipulated the time lines, wove them into its workings. But she picked up her pace quickly, adjusting.

"Do you think it'll stay fixed, everything on Sedna?"

"Oh, sure it will."The Doctor said breezily, "Put Time right and tight, job of the Last of the Time Lords."

Jenny put the calculation for the year in, and watched as the lines shifted and changed around the rotor.

"You're not, you know."She said, staring upwards. Her father quirked an eyebrow at her.

"Not?"

"Not the last Time Lord. There's two of us now."

The Doctor smiled, pulling several switches.

"Three, actually."

That made Jenny snap to attention. "Three?!!"

The Doctor glanced up at her, frowning. "Yes three, I told you about…" then his dark eyes grew wide, and he smacked himself across the forehead.

"Oh no I didn't tell you, I never thought, oh I can't believe it, thick, thick, so thick! Jenny, put in coordinates zero-zero-fifty nine seventeen. She may give me my eleventh go round for this, going to be a bit of a shock-"

"Why are we going to Betelgeuse?" Jenny asked. In response, the Doctor gave her one of his huge, wild possibilities grins.

"Because, Jenny, there's somebody on the other side of Betelgeuse that you have got to meet. Let's get going!"

**Author's Note: Thanks to Catharicorne and Alcibe for their help. Thanks to Lindenharp for the use of the Kelosite idea. Ciao!**


End file.
